Triple Click - The Great Ace Attorney, Or, Why We Love Visual Novels

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

We're all about visual novels here at Triple Click. What's that, you ask? What's a visual novel? Well, allow Kirk, Maddy, and Jason to tell you: it's kind of like a book... but better! Join us to talk about the stellar new game The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, the horniness of Fire Emblem and Persona, and why sometimes gameplay just isn't all that great.Games Discussed:The Great Ace Attorney ChroniclesDanganronpaSteins;GateThe House on Fata MorganaFire Emblem: Three HousesPersona 4 and 513: Sentinels: Aegis RimDisco ElysiumPlanescape: TormentZork80 DaysOverboardDoki Doki Literature ClubLadykiller in a BindAI: The Somnium Files999 and Virtue’s Last RewardOne More Thing: Kirk: LimetownMaddy: Plan BJason: Activision BlizzardLinks:Jason’s report on Warcraft III: Reforged: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-22/inside-activision-blizzard-s-botched-warcraft-iii-reforged-gameSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

deduction, my dear Watson, is something Sherlock Holmes might say. So what does Herlock Shome say? Weduction, Dimeir Dotson? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we're talking about novels, but not just any novels, visual novels, specifically the many game series that we love that borrow from the storied visual novel tradition, from Phoenix Wright to Fire Emblem to Dangan Rompah and beyond. I'm Kirk Hamilton.

I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Shire, and we are back for another episode. Here we are. We're back. Here we are. Definitely haven't been trying to record this for the past hour and running into technical issues every time. No, I'm not, I don't have all my fingers and toes crossed that this recording will just keep

going and nothing will explode, which so far it hasn't. It's still good. So I think that we're fine. I feel like we should have like picked an apocalypse topic or something to go along with how cursed tonight's recording has been for the three of us in a way that none of the listeners will ever see. No, they won't. It is something that's just a truism of podcasting, that sometimes you just have cursed days where everything breaks.

Kind of for everybody, but wow, there's been a lot of broken technology. At any rate, we make a podcast. It's called Triple Click. We're pretty good at it usually. And we appreciate that you're all Maximum Fun members. Those of you who are members and support us making the show, you know the deal. Go to Maximumfund.org. Join to become a member.

We hope you all liked the Beans Talk that we recorded last week, or we answered deep questions from all of our listeners. Those were pretty wonderful, a lot of fun to do. And yeah, we also answer questions on the regular show in our burning questions segments. We're going to do one of those in a couple of weeks. So if you'd like to send a question for us to answer, send it to triple click at maximum fun.org. That's triple click at maximum fun.org. You can also just, you know, send emails, like tell us how the weather is, something like that. Yeah. Let us know about the weather. Or just join the the Discord for that. There's a whole channel in there. That's true. There's a whole channel in Discord. And speaking of the Discord, we are still playing through

Half-Life 2 over there. I'm almost done with it. Jason, I believe, has just started. Maddie and Jason are going to finish the game, and we will be talking about it in two weeks on our August 19th episode. So if you're playing along, that's when we're going to talk about the entirety of Half-Life 2, and we'll save the episodes for a beans cast a little bit later, a little bit later on for a bonus episode.

So that's an action-packed game. We're not talking about action-packed games on this episode. We're going to be talking about games with a lot of reading games with static, beautiful-looking characters that just stand and occasionally shift between static poses while text slowly scrolls out on the screen. We're talking about visual novels, or at least our love of games that are influenced by visual novels. So it's a hot topic. We're talking about visual novels. I'm so excited.

I feel like this is continuing in the tradition of Triple Click secretly being a books podcast. As this knows very well. So it should come as no surprise that all three of us like visual novels, which if you like books, if you like reading, then you, the listener, probably also like visual novels and interact with fiction, as it is sometimes called. So I wonder a lot. So a lot of the games that we talk about that are very near and dear to each of our hearts, these are games like the Ace Attorney Series, the Dangan Rampas series, the Nanconrampus series,

the Non-Rie games, 999 Virtues Last Reward, JRP, is like Fire Emblem and Persona. Recently, Jason's been raving about the house on Fatah Morgana. There are so many of these games. Disco Elysium, also a lot of reading and disco-lecyum. Kind of a lot of reading, right, and we'll get into the whole. whole interactive fiction versus visual novel thing. Why is, are we weird that we like these kinds of games? Or is this like a kind of thing that a lot of people like?

I always wonder, when we go off on a tangent about Dangan Rompah, are we the weird podcast that likes visual novels or is this a pretty widely liked thing? Do you have a sense of this? A mix of both. Like, I think that's something that's really appealing about visual novels is that they can deliver story in a way that books and any other medium can't. And it's not just because of the obvious. Like obviously a visual novel is a visual component. So it's not just reading a book. You're also getting music and art and pictures and sometimes great animation and stuff like that.

And sometimes voice acting. But also the main reason that I think visual novels are so effective is because they control how much of the text and what text appears on any given screen. As opposed to a book, where you can sometimes turn the page and your eye catches something in the bottom of the book and you're like, oh man, I wasn't supposed to see that. Even when you're reading an e-book, sometimes you get like, you're kind of reading it in your own pace and you are getting information distributed it to you. And pacing is definitely a thing, but you're kind of taking it all in at once. Whereas reading a visual novel, you have beats that the designers craft really carefully. And I thought a lot about that recently because I've been playing the hell out of the great Ace

attorney chronicles, which I actually finished last night. I think it's my favorite game of the year so far. It's excellent. Just warning you guys, unfortunately, the second game is way better than the first game. Unfortunately. Did you just say unfortunately? Well, unfortunately, because the first game starts off kind of slow in some ways. All I know is, Jason, I'm pretty near the beginning, and the prosecutor is a vampire, and he's drinking from a hallowed chalice in court.

So it doesn't feel like a slow start to me. Yes. Baroque Van Zix. A dude rules. like two different dramatic points. He does the one that's the like kind of coy taunting dramatic point. And then there's the really strong one when he's bringing the

heat. And I'm a huge fan. Yes. So the great Ace Attorney, it's the latest game in the Ace Attorney series. I've talked about it a couple times on my one more thing. It's a prequel. It keeps coming back up on this show. Just keeps coming back up. But the reason I bring it up is because one of the reasons that this series in general is so effective is because

of the way it delivers information. And like, it can, it can, the series writer and designers know exactly how to most effectively convey like a twist or a beat or an emotional, a piece of emotional, something that emotionally resonates with you in those like little dialogue boxes that'll be like a two-sentence thing. And it'll be like, like, you'll suddenly realize a plot twist exactly when the game wants you to. And when those moments happen, it can be really, really cool and really effective in a way that like reading a book isn't. And pacing is such an important part of those

games the way that like the characters will just like battle back and forth with words and the way like that everything will speed up when you get to a certain intense part or the way that like occasionally someone will yell objection dramatically and the camera will pan between different people as everyone's stunned silence and most most effective of all I think is when suddenly everything will go black around your protagonist and your protagonist will have this revelation and it'll just be like wait a minute No, it couldn't be. And then you'll have to like, you'll suddenly realize it at the same time and you'll have to like pick a piece of evidence or pick a person from your court record. And it's just super cool.

It's something that just like other forms of media can't really do. There's something to the, a lot of the way that a lot of these different games use the tropes of visual novels. Phoenix Wright or the Ace Attorney series, since we're talking about that, they use the internal monologue super, super well. Ryo Nusuke. Your protagonist is like always thinking to himself just like Phoenix was in the same. those games. And it's like this blue, you know, in parentheses, like a parenthetical thought. And usually he is much more confident and aware of what's going on than he seems able to express in the moment because he's almost always being kind of railroaded at the beginning of the trial and he's the

underdog. And then he'll think to himself what you're thinking. Like the internal monologue lines up much more where I'm like, who is this ridiculous person? Or that's not fair. Or wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. And he'll think it. But instead he'll kind of just stammer and like not, you know, not respond that way. And it is really cool then when he goes inside and he stops and he like pulls it out and then it goes into his actual voice and he like does the point and like delivers the thing and blows everybody away. Yeah. I feel like what is interesting about Ace Attorney though is that much like a mystery novel, there's only ever one right answer to any situation that you're in. It's not it's not even doing like the telltale games thing where there's

sort of an illusion that you could reach the same ending in multiple ways. It really is that if you show the wrong piece of evidence in any moment, the characters will either gently mock you or express confusion and be like, why are you showing me this? Is this what you meant to take out of your pocket just then? And you have to just keep trying until you're like, oh, I guess it's this other piece of related evidence that I need to show you in order to get you to say the thing I know you already know so that you're on the same page as me, the player. I experience that not all the time. And in Ace Attorney games, but it, you know, periodically. You're picking a piece of evidence and you're like,

I know what I'm referring to, but it just isn't lining up with what the game wants me to do. So there is something a little particular about it. But then also just plot-wise, I don't think the Ace Attorney trilogy for the Switch that we've all played did this, but this version, Great Ace Attorney, I'm playing it on the Switch, does have a mode where it's like the book version and you don't make any choices. I don't know if you two looked at the settings for the game, but it's literally like, like you don't have to click on anything at all anymore. It will pick out the evidence for you and just sit there and watch it like it's an anime,

subtitled anime or whatever. Like you can literally just watch the entire game, which is, I don't know. I mean, it never really occurred to me until I looked at that. That is the way the game could be played. But of course, as I'm playing it, I'm like, some of these clicks are a little perfunctory. Like, it's really just me advancing the dialogue and like, then they're giving me a button prompt to click on another piece of dialogue, but like, did they need to do this? Not really. It is, it is a book, but it's also, I mean, this is why it's a visual. No, that's, I think

that's really interesting, though, because it kind of, it gets at the question of interactivity and also the question of pacing that you were talking about earlier, Jason, where in this game, and this is is the, I think, a first for the series, you can sort of page through the dialogue, but they're still delivering it in a certain way. And there are these points of friction when I'm playing. There was one time where I had to brute force an evidence presentation, because I just just couldn't really figure out what I was supposed to be doing. And I just kind of saved it and then just went through everything, which I'm sure listeners have done, maybe the two of you have done before. You showed just every piece of evidence until you advance the plot. Because you're like, I don't know

what I'm supposed to do. But I want to respond to something else, Manny was talking about, which is, Mani, it sounds like you weren't necessarily talking about the puzzle part, but the dialogue part where you have to keep selecting topics. Like that's what you were talking about, right? I mean, that's a part of it as well. But I mean, it is true that in order to advance any aspect of the story, you have to present the right piece of evidence as well. Like, that's the closest to a puzzle that the game is. So I actually think it's kind of brilliant the way that the conversations unfold in Ace Attorney because you'll be asking something, you'll pick a topic, you'll be asking questions,

and you'll watch the back and forth. And then it'll either end with like a cliffhanger, a sort of cliffhanger that like leads into the next topic, or it'll end and make you feel like, oh, okay, it's time for me to ask the next question. It feels like it gives you the rhythm of like, actually. interrogating a witness in a way that just reading through it wouldn't, I think. And that again, is too, it speaks to the point that I was making before about pacing and the way that these games can deliver information in a way that other forms of media can't. But yes, Kirk, to Europe,

to what you were saying, the whole idea, the evidencing has always been a finicky part of Phoenix Wright games. Right. Right. And it always been criticized for like, because you have to know what the designer is thinking some of the time. Yeah. You mentioned rhythms. And I think that like the, the whole rhythm of a game, of any of these games, especially though. I mean, I'm thinking of a trial, I guess, and Dangan Romp is similar, but especially Phoenix Wright. It has its own distinct rhythm and they introduce new things that have their own rhythms in each game. We talked during one more thing last week about the deduction sequences where Herlock Shulms deduces kind of incorrectly, like he's amazing at it, but he always reaches their own conclusions and then you correct him.

And the way that those sequences work. Best character in the whole game, by the way. So funny. He's the best character because he allows these sequences to take place. And it's so this mix of rhythm, like musical rhythm, and like conversational rhythm and your kind of the pauses for when you pick the thing, the spotlight dropping down. The way the whole thing is presented is so this sort of smorgasbord of cool, of cool like beats hitting you in this rhythmic way. And it works super, super well. It's like the, it's the best thing I've maybe ever done in an Ace attorney game. I totally love them. And it really is. It's the kind of thing that, you know, I'm sure that novelists love the constraints of writing just on a page and having

that control. Like, I'm trying to think, I've never written a novel, but I would imagine that the opening line of a new chapter, that's kind of your big moment to really land something because you know there's going to be a page turn, and then you're going to hit them with that, and that's the one time when you have the most control. But that's, like, the closest you come, and that's a tiny amount of control compared to the amount of control that a team making a visual novel like the ones we're talking about can exert. Actually, okay, so that brings up an interesting point. So having written, not novels, but books,

I think the similar structure you can play around within books is ending chapters and ending subsections within chapters where you have to write, like an ending of any chapter or of any subsection has to feel a certain way. It has to give off a certain emotion. Otherwise, it kind of feels flat. And it almost feels like a game like Phoenix Raid is just full of those constantly. Like almost every line is like one of the... those stopping points or at the very least every every every exchange of dialogue ends with something like

that so i think that really gives a unique flavor to it and that applies for all all visual novels i think at least the good ones um phata morgana which kirka and mattie i'm curious to hear if you guys have played any more of that yeah but that game also just has its interesting rhythms and that almost feels more novelistic in the way it's written um and it has a lot of prose it has a lot of just description and flavor to it um and it's less like punchy dialogue after punchy dialogue But again, it's all about, yeah, that rhythm. I've played just a bit of that game, and I'm very excited to play it just based on your feedback and the stuff I've seen online, that it's this really incredible story.

I really want to kind of sit down and play it. I finish the books I was reading, and now I'm playing Ace Attorney, and it kind of feels like they're all in the same sort of zone for me. I play them like I read books. And I started it, and I did notice how it's, I feel like maybe truer to the actual, like, Japanese visual novel, which is kind of this term that we're bastardizing. in this conversation and I'm sure there are people listening being like, I hope that he mentions at least

that this is actually a thing that is a little bit different than what they're talking about because I believe like a true visual novel has no interactivity really like kind of going back to the ones that are just published in Japan and don't really make their way over here and they're you know I guess I think Stein's Gate is closer to

like just a pure visual novel in that way is that right? I don't know. You know more than I do. No, it's got some choices and stuff. It does. Okay. But yes, it's definitely, it's It's pure, yeah, it's pretty pure. Right, and like Fatah Morgan I gather is more like that. And playing it, I'm noticing just how much like a book it is.

You can roll back pages, you can, like, go forward and backward. And one thing that it does that's really interesting is there's a lot more description. Like, there is just a description of like where you've gone and what you're seeing and what you're smelling and what you're hearing. And so it's way more like reading a book than something like an Ace attorney or, you know, the more visual novelty elements in like a persona or something or 13 sentinels. these games that really show you everything and they have animated characters walking around on the screen and it's mostly just dialogue that's presented in that format.

When you're getting just like you walk outside like the breeze blows across, you smell this, you know, it's much more like reading a book. Part of that is definitely for budget reasons. They don't have the budget of an Ace Attorney and the animations that an Ace Attorney has. It's effective though, right? It's the same magic that a book has

where you use your imagination instead of being shown it. Definitely effective. Oh yeah. I mean, books are the lowest budget games of them all. That's so true. I've always said that, you know? Yeah, that is true. This is why you shouldn't pre-order a book. I mean, we've gone over this.

We have. It's not even worth it. Unless it's one that one of the three of us is written. So we talked a lot about this kind of thing when we talked about Disco Elysium, which I would kind of peg as interactive fiction. Is this a meaningful distinction? Or an RPG. Because you level up in that game.

I mean, you can level up certain skills in that. And like, persona, of course, is an RPG. It just has so much reading in it. Yeah, it's definitely not interactive fiction. Interactive fiction is Zork. Yeah, I should clarify that like, I guess I mean that like that the lineage that Disco Elysium is in is more the interactive fiction lineage than the visual novel lineage. Even though, yes, of course, it is also like a branching story-based RPG with like stats

that you level up and all kinds of, you know, different like things that open and close, depending on the choices that you make. Yeah, I think that's more like the planescape tournament, like heavy text. RPG lineage. Well, those are also kind of in the interactive fiction mold, right? Yeah, it's all just kind of like bringing traditional storytelling to games as opposed to like the systemic storytelling that many other games enjoy. And like basing choices on which dialogue you choose as being the central choice that

you're making as opposed to I'm walking here, I'm shooting this person. Like those aren't the choices you're necessarily making in a game like Disco Elysium. You are choosing dialogue and then that is opening up. other dialogue for you. Like to me, that is what I see as being interactive fiction is like the dialogue choices I'm clicking on are opening up the plot to me. And maybe it's maybe it's opening up different plot pathways. Like in discolosium, there's multiple endings you could get to an extent ish. You kind of end up in the same place, but different things can unfold when you get there. But in something like Ace Attorney, you are still choosing dialogue, but it's really holding your hand

so much more that I'd be more likely to call it a visual novel. Although really, these kinds of definitions, they're not, I don't worry about them so much. I just like to read and I'm like, whatever kind of game that is where you're doing a lot of reading and you're clicking on some words, I'm into it. I like you. Right.

It is, I agree in like genre doesn't exist and all of that. And like, I draw a distinction between games like 80 days, overboard or someone that we talked about, where it's like a lot of just reading. And a lot of different endings and over. Right, and very branching. So overboard is maybe closer in presentational style to the kind of visual novels we're talking about because there's like, you know, a standing drawing of a person and the dialogue is going across where 80 days feels like a book that is just sort of unrolling for you and you're picking what you're going to do next. And is designed to look like a book that you're reading even, which is fun. So I guess some of the visual novel thing comes down to the tropes of the visual novel, which is sort of related to the tropes of the dating sim, like all of these games.

kind of fall under an umbrella where you'll just, it's like there are just certain things that you see. A lot of it is very anime-based like it draws from anime. And I see it across all of these games. I'm thinking of Fire Emblem, Three Houses, which all the Fire Emblem games have had like romance stories in them before. But am I wrong in remembering that Three Houses was the one that felt the most like a visual novel? Yeah, it's worth noting. I think there are traditionalists out there who would say that like even Ace Attorney and Dangenrop are not a visual novel. because they have too much, too much puzzle, too many puzzles and stuff like that.

There are a lot of visual novels that I think are just, are just in an area where I certainly have not stumbled upon them, they're kind of so niche that like only a handful of people played them. A lot of them are Japanese only, for example. Yeah. And a lot of those are definitely, I mean, a lot of them are about dating sort of like persona or sort of like Fire Emblem. And it's interesting to see what happens when a game like Fire Emblem, which is, I guess, more mainstream than your average kind of dating heavy visual novel, when that gets, when that has that stuff and how popular it becomes as a result and how much it shows that like maybe some of this

stuff doesn't have to be niche. I do think that one of the reasons that a lot of visual novels are niche is because not a lot of people just want to read. Like people do want some gameplay. And that's the reason Firearm... I think one of the reasons probably the main reason Fire on them is so popular is because it takes that visual novel dating and crosses it with this like super addicting chess like strategy gameplay. Which you could also say a persona. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's totally true because as much as persona is a fun turn-based RPG, all anyone talks about in that game. You're like building your ideal click. Yeah. It's like who does you, who did you date?

Yeah. Who are your wifu. And who are your friends and who are your besties and who did you like end up really liking that you didn't expect to? and everybody's secret dark mysteries inside of their brains that were revealed to you. That is the real game of persona is getting those things revealed. And so, at least for me, for my tasting games, I find it really interesting when a game like House of Van Morgana comes out

and really kind of stands out to me in such a way that it makes me look past the fact that you don't actually do anything, you just read it. It's one of the only games I play that is like literally just reading, as to your point, Kirk, earlier about like it being a pure visual novel. Stein's Gade is probably the other one that I played that is just, just reading. And yeah, it's cool when that sort of game has an effect on me. And it resonates with people. It's cool.

I'm happy that I played both of those. Yeah, it's a thing. It's really got to be a good story for that and part of it to work. Because I'll like, I guess I liked the story of Fire Emblem Three Houses. Like, it was cool. There were definitely moments in the story. And, like, there were parts in that where I got really pumped. A pretty cool time jump.

Yes. And that really around there was really cool. Although it wasn't like the plot was really grabbing me so much, but I also really liked playing the game. And that's somewhere where 13 Sentinels, which is a game that I know you played all the way through last year, Jason. Yes. That's another one, though, with really heavy visual novel elements that sort of is like clinging together a visual novel and like a kind of mediocre,

like, tactics, RTS. And that really didn't work for me because I was into the story well enough. It was a little hard to tell everyone apart, but I made a little chart and was like writing down who is who. And so I was keeping track of it. And I was into it. It took the win out of my sales a little, Jason, when you said that you finished and you thought the ending was

disappointing. But the RTS part was just so not my thing. I just looked weird and I didn't like it. And I've even seen takes saying that that was the point that it was supposed to be bad. And I'm like, come on. You know, the game was supposed to not.

when a game critic is arguing that something is actually supposed to be bad. It's really painful and it's like meta and it's about how games are bad if you think about it. Right, that's it. If it were fun, no, right. And so that really, but that really undercut that game for me where if it had been really fun or just passable with all these characters I was getting to know, I probably could have gotten really into it and instead I kind of fell off. If it was a possible game by it all. Yes, that was atrocious, the real-time strategy stuff and not because it was a real-time strategy.

game because it was a bad real-time strategy game, as an RTS fan up in here. I'm always disappointed when I'm playing a game and I feel like what the developers really wanted was to just let me read the game, but they felt as though they had to include some aspect that like it's almost as though you can tell they don't even want it to be there. And it's like the least thought out aspect of the game. And like I'm listening to a podcast when I'm doing it and then I'm pausing the podcast when I get back to what I perceive as the actual game, which is. reading. That is never a good sign. And I feel like what has been so refreshing to me about playing

Ace Attorney after having not played one of these for a long time since the trilogy a few years back is just like, oh, this is just reading. Like, yeah, there's a little bit of puzzle solving, but like it's not that hard and you can brute force it if you need to. And mostly I'm just reading a great mystery with tons of foreshadowing and like jokes and I'm laughing out loud at things in it and just really enjoying it. Yeah, it rules. I, Take video games out of visual novels. That's what I'm saying. Just don't even put RTS and sit there.

They don't need to be there. Just let me read. That's super true, though. When you look at 13 Sentinels, like, it's very clear which part of that game is like the lovingly created, beautiful, really well done part of the game. And the other part that this is kind of like,

I don't know. Like, let's just put something in there. I don't know what the development of that game was, but it feels that way, at least, at least looking on it. I will say, I think that Ace Attorney, first of all, this new version, the great Ace Attorney, is so good in so many ways.

But one of the things I love about it is that it's very, very good at like recognizing when you're stuck and giving you hints. And like almost it almost leans on the side of being too easy as a result. But still, like if you fail to, if you present the wrong evidence, you'll almost always get some sort of hint that it's like, hey, have you thought about this thing? But also, I mean, Maddie, to your point, I think if you took the gameplay out of Phoenix Wright games, it would really lose something because like there's really nothing like that revelation that you get when you realize just when the game wants you to realize who you have to present or what you have to present.

My favorite ever twist in one of these games, maybe my favorite, one of my favorite twists in game story history is in Ace Attorney 5. And people who have played it will know what I'm talking about. I won't spoil it, of course. But at the end of that game, there's a moment where Phoenix Wright, like the screen turns blank, like black like I mentioned before, behind Phoenix Wright. and it closes up on his face and he's just like, ah, ha ha ha. Oh, I know what you're talking about.

Yes, okay. Oh, Kirk, you finish. You finish Acey 5. Oh, yes. You know exactly what I'm talking about. And you come to the same revelation that he does and then you have to present that certain thing or person like in coordination with him.

And it is just the coolest moment. Like, I'll remember how I was feeling on that moment forever. And I don't think it would have had the same effect if there wasn't gameplay attached to these games. Even though it's very. subtle gameplay. Like the extent of you having a choice or feeling any ownership over it is like just opening a UI screen and pointing it an object. It's like so little interactivity, but it's just enough that you feel as though you are Phoenix right. Yeah. Well, that makes a little difference. Even just, yeah, I think that like interactivity, we always think of it as like choosing something or doing something.

But interactivity, when it asks you to just push a button to keep reading, I think that has a power to it also. And that's what I was talking about before with the page. Like the fact that you have to keep pressing the A button or touchscreen or whatever to exceed each new line of dialogue It makes you a more active participant than if you're just like reading a page of a book and maybe you have to turn a page occasionally, but like your eyes are kind of glazing over. Yeah, books are the start of long. No, fuck books. Seriously. For real. I think there's a lot of power to to the interactivity of a visual novel even when you're not actually making choices. Yeah, no, I agree. I've been struck by I guess I've been struck by this because I'm I am a longtime fan of the Ace Attorney series, but I've been struck by all of the new ideas in this new one and how the increased technology that they have access to has allowed them

to just expand, like, the possibility of a given interaction or court case in Ace Attorney in ways that are really exciting and make me wish, you know, we love Dengen Romp, but we haven't talked about a lot about Dengen Rampa on this episode. It does rule, though. It does rule, and it has a lot in common with Phoenix Wright. It's very formulaic. it's like, you know, there's a trial at the end of each chapter. It's a lot darker.

It's a lot weirder. At the trial, you have to, like, shoot truth bomb guns and people in order to, like, solve their misconceptions. Yeah. It's basically contradictions from Phoenix, right, except in the different. But right, it's very, and it has that same energy of, like, what really happened and you're solving a murder and, like, the music gets pumping, and then someone's yelling something else, and you figure out what it is at the exact moment, and you blow everyone's mind,

and expose the real killer, which is like very, very similar in between the two games. But the way that the Great Ace Attorney works now, there's so much more elaborate staging going on. I'm doing my, I guess, second full trial, which is the third chapter, and there's a jury. So there are six jury members, there are six jurors, which is just totally new to this series. There's also witness testimony now happens with multiple people at the same time. So they'll be like presenting and sitting on screen at the same time, looking at each other, and it'll just be staged in a way that old games never did. In the old Phoenix Wright games, it would just be one person ever, like on screen at a time,

presumably because of technological restrictions. But also, I would have to think that as a writer, having the ability to suddenly present scenes with like four, five, six characters all presenting different scenes, or different lines of dialogue bouncing off of one another, it's so much more exciting and it makes it just as a piece of fiction, like as a piece of writing, just way more dynamic and interesting. And I'm excited to see where it goes. And it also makes me hope that series like Dangan Rompah

that I also really like will continue to evolve in the same way and kind of elaborate things in the same way. Because I'd imagine it'd be pretty easy to just sort of coast along and keep making similar games in that style without expanding things. Yeah. I want to talk about a game that you haven't actually listed here, Kirk, but that you guys may have heard of,

the game called AI the Somnium files. I believe I talked about this. Yeah, you did. talk about it. A couple of years ago. This is a game by the maker of the Zero Escape series, another great visual novel series. And this game is really interesting because it has a lot of cool story

and really interesting dialogue and lots of good stuff. But it also has these gameplay sequences that are just like trial and error of like picking options and having no indication of which is the right one. In these like weird dream sequences, you guys remember this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought about it, Maddie, to the point you were making earlier about how, like, sometimes it feels like they just have to throw in these gameplay sequences. I thought about that a lot with this because it feels like it's trying, it's like weird. It's like doing the whole point and click adventure thing where you have to pick up objects and use them with other objects.

But because you're in a dream scheme, none of them actually make sense and they're supposed to not make sense. It's very strange. It doesn't really work for me. They just announced a sequel, actually, that's coming next year. So I'm very excited for that to see if they improve upon. some of the stuff I didn't like about it. But that's a game where I was playing it, Maddie, and was just wishing that it was just text.

Yeah, yeah. I have that experience pretty often because I enjoy reading. I don't know. I guess we'll have to see how the sequel turns out. There are two other games that I definitely want to mention, which are sort of games that take the visual novel paradigm and then screw with it in different ways. And that is a dokey-dokey literature club,

which I feel, I think all three of us have played. Well, that's a dating sim. I mean, dating sims are like adjacent to visual novels. Right. I mean, it is different, I suppose. But it's like there's a lot of the same sort of aesthetic tropes exist in both of these, in both of those. I think of, I guess, dating sims is a subgenre of visual novel. I would agree.

Yeah. But dokey dokey deserves discussion in this conversation. And also Lady Killer in a bind, which is that a visual novel or a dating sim? What would you say? You've played it, right, Maddie? Tough call. Tough call. I mean, yeah, you can date people in that game,

but I don't feel like that's the entire point of that game. It's more to tell a story about the people in the game, which I think is also what dokey, dokey literature club is about, although dokey is also just a horror game. I don't know. I have mixed feelings about it. So when dokey came out, I was super into it. I played it when I was very depressed and, like,

dealing with a lot of brain troubles, shall we say. And I was way into it. because I was like, this game's really dark, and it's depicting suicides, and, like, that's where I'm at mentally. And I'm into it. And I feel like this game's really speaking to me in this moment. And, like, the guy who wrote it has talked about having depression. And, like, I think that's, like, really clear, a clear thing that he did. But it's also just a very shocking game. Like, a lot of the game's subversive elements are, like, designed to shock you with, like, horrible visual imagery and juxtaposing the idea of these really cute tropey dating sim girls like they're all visual novel

stereotypes like oh like the little cutesy one who like acts like a child but she's actually not a child and like the sort of like nerdy one and like the confident outgoing club leader etc like they're all tropes and then those tropes are exaggerated and then unpacked for you and then made horrifying And like now looking back on it, I'm like, was it just the fact that it was shocking that I really liked? Or I don't know. I can't, I don't have a conclusion on this. But I do think it's cool that it exists. Like I would like to see more games trying what it tries, which is like taking a genre and being like,

what if I completely unravel every expectation that you have about how this story is going to go and confuse the heck out of you? And it also does the undertale thing where like you have to kind of get outside of the game space in order to realize what the game itself is doing. And I dig that too. Yeah. There's a sort of a viciousness to that game that I just found very compelling. And I haven't played it since. I played through it when we were, it was in the in talks for Kitakakus game of the year, I think in 2017 when it came out. And it just got re-released.

So I think some new people are playing it. Yeah. And it definitely has a sharpness to it. And it's a sort of a, I always think of the movie. Cabot in the Woods that the people who made it described it as a hate letter to horror movies. It feels like a hate letter to dating sims a little bit in a way that I just, I find really, I find interesting. And I like any game that will play with really established tropes like that. And that's one reason that I mentioned Lady Killer in a bind. I had played that.

And I played it again. And this is Christine Love's game, which is sort of a dating sim slash, like, kind of erosage. It's an erotic game. There's like, if you want, there's pretty graphic sex scenes. in this game. And it's a lot about like BDSM and consent and stuff too. Yes. And it turns out in playing that game that the visual novel is a really great format for explaining that kind of thing, because the games are so rigid and you don't actually have a lot of control over what you're doing and you're put into these scenarios where like you think that you can like, you know, someone is telling you to say something and you have a series of responses you can give. But do you really have those responses and can you really give them? And it plays with the first.

format, I think in some ways that are super interesting. It's a very adult game, but for anyone who's like, wants to play something a little more experimental and interesting, Lady Killer in her bind is a really, really cool game. It also has like an interrupting mechanic that I don't think I've seen any other visual novel do, where like as characters are talking to you, uh, options for what you can say back will flash on screen, but only for a brief period of time where the topic is still relevant and you have to like click on it in time to like interrupt them and say that thing. But you can also look at it and be like, oh, I don't want to broach that with them and like it'll just go away. And I really like that aspect of it. And yeah,

you're right. Like it is very much about control and how little control you actually have as a player with a visual novel. And I think dokey is about that too. Like it is taking that sense of control that you have with a dating sim in particular where you truly feel as though you're making all the choices and then taking that away from you in a horror way that is like kind of fun and interesting and definitely something that plays with the idea of the fact that this is just reading and you're just reading some stuff that somebody wrote for you and you don't really have that many choices because it's a book. Right.

It's a lot less fun and sexy in dokey dokey. Yeah, it's more like terrifying and how dare you think it was going to be fun and sexy. Lady Killer is fun and sexy. Yes, yes. Well, I want to hear from listeners if there's any visual novels or visual novel type games that we should play by all means, let us know. As you can tell, we're all kind of interested in them, but also there's such a world. I feel like there's such a world out there of these games that we don't know about.

But also, the New Ace Attorney game is super great. Pretty good. Yeah, and I'm totally going to finish it. It's so good, you guys. Let's take a break, and then we'll be back with one more thing. Hi, I'm Annabelle Gerrich. And I'm Laura House. And we're the host of Tiny Victories. My tiny victory is that I sewed that button back on the day after it broke.

We talk about that little thing that you did that's a big deal to you, but nobody else cares. Did you get that Guggenheim Genius Award? We don't want to hear from you. We want little bitty tiny victories. My tiny victory is a tattoo that I added on to this past weekend. Let's talk about it. My victory is that I'm one-year cancer-free, but my tiny victory is that I took all of the cushions off the couch, pounded them out, put them back, and it looks so great. So if you're like us and you want to celebrate the tiny achievements of ordinary people,

Listen to Tiny Victories. It's on every Monday on Maximum Fun. Mr. Rubelman, what are you doing? I'm just taking one last look at my coworkers. Every journey comes to an end. Remember, PLEC. The space will be with you, always. Sorry, who are you again?

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We've got the costumes. We've got a stage. We can do it, you guys. Mission to Zix, the final season on maximum fun. And we're back for one more thing. Jason Schreier. What's your one more thing? Yeah, I'm going to talk a little bit more about Activision Blizzard,

mostly because I don't have anything else to talk about, because it has kind of dominated my life for the past week. I can imagine. Yeah, there's been a lot of stuff has happened since last we talked about this last week. Blizzard's president, Jay, Alan Brak is gone to new people have started or are new co-leaders in his place. Jen O'Neill and Mike Yavara noticed that they're called co-leaders, not co-presidents, which I think says a lot that I'll get to in a second.

But also there was a big walkout last week that happened, I believe right before our episode went live, the day before our episode went live. But after we had recorded, the Blizzard employees who organized the walkout made a bunch of demands and the company ignored those. demands certainly did not respond to them or acknowledge them in any way. And lots of other stuff happen. I'm working on a big feature piece that will hopefully be live around the same time as this episode is live, but maybe not. Maybe it'll be later in the week. I don't know. Who knows? You never know with these things. But I will say that one of the things I wanted to talk about, I mean,

there are a lot of kind of aspects of this whole thing that are worth getting into. But one of the things that I've been following most closely is Activision's role in Blizzard. And as I talked about a little bit last week, I've been reporting for years now about Activision's increased influence on Blizzard. I don't want to say that Bobby Codick was jumping for joy at all of this stuff, but I certainly don't think he was too unhappy to get rid of Jay Allen Brack and replace Blizzard's president with two quote unquote co-leaders because I believe that it gives him even more of an opportunity than he already had to kind of exert his will onto blizzard and there was something really interesting in the official blizzard communication of that um announcement of brack's departure

and um they essentially in their blog post on this they called blizzard a studio and i don't know if activation or blizzard has ever called blizzard a studio before because they're not a studio They're kind of this independent organization with their own whole publishing team and PR team and marketing team and business team and all this other stuff. Esports, all this other stuff. But Bobby Coddick kind of tipped his hand there and revealed what many Blizzard employees think that he's been after a whole long, which is transforming Blizzard into another one of Activision Studios on par with everything else. He doesn't like the idea of Blizzard being autonomous as an organization. Now, all that said, like I mentioned last week, there's been a lot of talk over the years about

Lizard's culture getting eroded. Something we've learned very recently is that maybe parts of Blizzard's culture needed to be eroded because Blizzard's culture might not have been so great if you weren't a dude. And so that is certainly an aspect of this whole thing. But that's not what Activision's been doing. What we've been watching Activision, too, is push the company to cut costs, do more with less, give people more jobs than they had before, release more products at a strong a stronger cadence at a faster clip, put more micro-transactions in their games, a lot of stuff

that is very Activision and very not Blizzard. And what I kind of fear, and a lot of Blizzard Insiders fear that will happen as a result of Bobby Codick replacing Jen on Back with these two other people, Jen O'Neill and Mike Ybarro, who both seem like pretty good leaders. And I've not heard a bad thing about either of them. But I think there's a real fear that Bobby Codick is going to exert Activision's well on the company in really bad ways and not his priority, I don't think, is cleaning up Blizzard's culture as much as it needs to be cleaned up. I think his priority is kind of molding Blizzard in the shape of other Activision Studios. And I think we're going to see a very different Blizzard moving forward as a result. I think this is going to accelerate whatever

timeline the Activision Takeover has had over the past few years where it's been kind of a slow, gradual process and I think it's going to lead to some big changes at Blizzard, just not necessarily the changes that employees there actually want because there are employees. It's worth noting. I know a lot of people out there like, I want to boycott Blizzard games, never want to do this again, but there are employees at Blizzard right now working very hard on games who are very proud of their work, who actually love being at Blizzard, a lot of women there who love being at Blizzard and just want to see some of these other things change. So they have a healthier workplace so they can feel more comfortable so they're paid more fairly, they're promoted more fairly, and I don't know that

Activision is going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. It sucks. It sucks when the change that's going to come to somewhere isn't the change that it needs, but instead the change that's just going to benefit very wealthy people in their own view. Yes. Yes. That said, look, I don't think Bobby Codac is going come in and micromanage. And if like someone like Jen O'Neill wants to actually like make some changes and get rid of some offenders who have maybe stuck around and and despite repeated HR complaints, like maybe there could be some real change on that front. But I also do know and I'm planning on reporting that the changes in Activision have made things a lot worse in a lot of ways, even some of the stuff like involving sexual discrimination, which tons of that was really bad

pre-activision. Don't get me wrong. Really important to make that point. Blizzard's problems are not because of Activision. But some of the things that Activision has done have definitely exacerbated those problems. I will point listeners to your article about Warcraft 3 because I think that that just, this is a Bloomberg article

that Jason reported a couple weeks ago about the re-release of Warcraft 3, which was Blizzard's first genuine just stinker that they put out and just how that kind of came to be. And I think that kind of gets it more of the stuff that you're talking about too. I thought that was a really interesting article.

We'll link it in show notes. Yeah, that's kind of a perfect confluence of like Blizzard problems. and also Activision Influence because a lot of that games issues were due to Blizzard and Blizzard culture and the classic games team

at Blizzard had a lot of the same issues that we've heard repeated over the past couple of weeks and combine that with Activision stepping in and saying, hey, we don't care about this, we care about Diablo and Overwatch and you get this recipe for a really bad product.

Ugh. Well, I'm sure we'll talk about it more as it continues to develop. Maddie, what's your one more thing? Yeah, so mine is a movie. It's called Plan B. I've never even heard of this. Rules. I had never heard of this movie.

I don't know where it came from. I think Hulu produced it. Okay. This is the world we live in. You don't know where a movie's coming from anymore. I don't know. Like this movie just sort of appeared. It came on the TV.

It came from the movie fairy. It's really how it is now. Yeah, the movie fairy delivered this movie to the front page of Dinas and my Hulu. I think Hulu produced this film. So I know I said 8th grade was on Hulu, but it's like because I have Showtime, I think it's on Hulu, and people were disappointed that they did not have the right Hulu. Totally the world that we live in. Yes.

Another, yeah. As far as I know, Plan B is on regular style Hulu, and if it's not, I'm sorry, and I hope you find another way to watch it because I thought it ruled. So Plan B, it is a comedy that almost has some beats that are like a horror movie, but not quite. And that is like exactly my jam. So it's also a female friendship movie about two teen girls who are played by Victoria Morales and Coooo Verma. And they are, it's like a raunchy sex comedy where one of them loses her virginity at like a wild high school party. That's the premise. And the next day she wakes up and realizes that there was a condom mishap that happened the previous night and that she needs plan B.

But the problem is that the two of them live in South Dakota. and because this is like a little bit of a horror movie, it is about how impossible it is to get Plan B in South Dakota and the various laws that have transpired to make it functionally impossible for two 17-year-old girls to get Plan B. And so the girl who has the pregnancy scare, her mother's out of town,

so she has like 24 hours to get the pill. And like, so it becomes like this crazy road trip movie and they like run into creepy guys. this is also like maybe X-rated because there is a penis in this movie and like a truly horrifying slash funny there's something about Mary-esque scene that I don't want to spoil

but is also like I don't even know it's crazy I'm picturing the scene from something about Mary so mission accomplished it is on that level in terms of like the kind of raunchy humor that Plan B brings to bear so like if you're on board for that I think you'll enjoy it

it like reminds me of BookSmart a little but it's way funnier and just, I don't know, we laughed at it a lot and super enjoyed it. And again, I had never heard of it. So it's called Plan B. And I just enjoyed the heck out of it. People should watch this movie. I love that raunchy humor, like in the style of like Penn 15. Like we're in this like post bridesmaids era of movies where women can just be sex fiends.

And it rules. I'm really glad we've achieved this as a society. It's great. Finally. Yeah, I loved Book Smart, so I'll totally watch that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. Nice. Well, my one more thing is a podcast that was really famous in 2015, and I'm sure some people are going to be like, why are you telling me about this?

But I only just listened to it and thought it was great. It's called Limetown. And it's a fiction podcast that is, it's like presented entirely, the first season is presented entirely straight-faced. It's in, you know, it's just like, this is a news podcast about this thing, but it's all fiction and it goes completely. nuts by the end of the season. Wait, wasn't there a podcast you listened to it or was fiction and you were pissed because

like you thought it was nonfiction? That's not this. No, that's not this. That was the one about the Pilebius, about Pilebius, the video game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is clear that it's fiction, right? So, you know, it is actually interesting and I've been thinking about it because there is no moment where they break K-fabe, the like, you know, the wrestling term for not-breaking character.

Right, you're like suspending your disbelief. They never do in season one. And then in season two, they do at the very end of the season. But in season one, it's presented as though it's American public radio, which is not a real public radio network. And she's a reporter. And she's looking into Lyme Town, which is the name of a town in Tennessee. There was the home of this, like, neurological research station where everybody vanished.

And it starts with her being like, everyone knows about Lyme Town in 2004 when it happened. But then we all just stopped talking about it. And no one really knew what happened. I'm going to try to find out. And then she just goes on this wild adventure. And I don't know, like, for whatever reason, that Polybius podcast bugged me because it seemed real. And, like, this one doesn't.

Maybe if I re-listen to it, I wouldn't be as bugged by it. Well, that's clear. If they're like, everyone knows about Live Town, then that makes it clear. Well, it was just very, yes. It's very unambiguous, very early on that this is not really happening. Especially because, like, if you're sitting there and you're like, well, I've never heard of it. And you Google it.

You're like, oh, it's fictional. Oh, it's fictional. Like pretty much immediately. Right. Yeah. Anyways, I thought it was great. We listened to it on our road trip that we drove down to California a couple weeks ago and just listened to it in the car, Emily and I did, and we just burned through the whole first season. I think the first season is significantly stronger than the second season, though.

The second season is really cool, too. And I just, I love the way that it's presented. It's fun to listen to you now because I've become so familiar with podcasting, just to hear something that's so, it's like a year after serial came out. It's very much in the mode of. of serial of the like public radio like produced investigative report but then pretty quickly they're not

trying to convince you that it's real so there'll just be times where like a person is recording in a time when they should not be recording and talking into the microphone or like they'll be describing things or even just performing there's a time where a guy lights a cigarette and he's like can I

smoke and she's like okay and he's like it's like it's like well you would edit that out Right. It's like the sound effects are just, it's like you're listening to a radio play, which is absolutely what you're doing. It's just a radio play that's presented as a podcast. Another very fun thing that they do is there will be, and these are still in the feed, these little bonuses that'll be sort of like, here's just the 911 call. And that's what it's called. And it's like two minutes long. And it's just a crazy 911 call from something they're going to explain on next week's episode. So it's kind of the teaser. But it's all totally presented in sort of in character. This sounds exactly like something that would be made during the age of serial. There's an exec from American public radio who like apologizes at one point for like something that they aired. So it's just really, really cool.

And I'm sure a lot of people listen to this know about it because it was huge. It was like made into a TV series for that Facebook streaming thing with Jessica Beale starring in it. Plus we all remember Limetown from 2004. Also right when that weird thing happened in Tennessee. If people haven't listened to it though, especially if you're like planning a road trip or your want like that kind of thing, it's super fun. really made me want to produce some podcast fiction. I was like, this would be so fun to work on. Like,

it really just is a lot of fun. Should we do a fictional triple click episode? It would be pretty, I would be pretty into it anyways. It would be pretty fun. So, yeah, check it out, Lime Town. It's really good. There's two seasons of it. And I thought it was really cool. So, yeah. Cool.

That's it. We successfully recorded this podcast. Thank God. He's kind of dicey for a bit there. No one will know how hard it was. But we did it. So you should all appreciate that we made it to the end in one piece to bring you this conversation about visual novels and other things that we like. So let's just quit while we're ahead. I will see both of you next week.

Bye. Oh, my goodness. What a night. I'm so hungry. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration.

You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod. Send email the triple click at Maximumfund.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfun.org. Comedy and culture. Artists owned.

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