Man. Why do some of the really intensely well-written games have to be so embarrassing to talk about online?
The topic of my (potential) embarrassment this time around is a Japanese visual novel slash point-and-click adventure game by the name of YU-NO. Recently chronicled in a highly enlightening article on Hardcore Gaming 101, and also coming to the forefront of news for people already familiar with it due to the unfortunate passing of the game's music composer, Ryu Umemoto, I became interested in YU-NO after learning that there was a very complete fan translation of the game. Those who know me well enough can probably guess how I got my hands on the game, but that's not the important point here.
YU-NO's story has many twists and turns, not all of which the player can naturally be present to witness at a given time. That's where the beauty of the game's narrative comes in, though - you don't hear of big events "through the grapevine", you aren't always conveniently in the exact place that something is going to happen, and you most definitely don't know exactly when a specific event will occur. But the game's rather unique save-game system is how we get around this. Here is a brief explanation of how it works.
Shortly after the game's prologue, you gain access to a device called a Reflector, two Jewels, and a Divergence Map. The Reflector doesn't really serve an in-game purpose besides the ability to pull up the in-game menu, should you decide you want to quit playing. The Jewels - of which you can carry up to 8 - are how the game's save system works. You can "bookmark" points in time by pressing one, at which point it vanishes and leaves a bookmark icon on the Divergence Map (which is, in reality, a gameplay device to help you discern where the plot branches will occur). If you open the Map and then click on the bookmark icon, you are warped back to the exact point when you used your jewel, but any items or jewels you may have gained or used will retain their current status. In short, if you bookmark a scene in which you need a crucial item but don't have it yet, obtain it much later in the story, and then restore the bookmark, you will still have the item and can use it. The game's own universe has its own explanation for this sort of behavior, in the form of many stacks of scientific documents (I've been told the game even comes with a physical copy of one such document). Parallel world theory plays a huge part in this; this isn't a simple time-travel plot.
Here's the thing, though. This plot device has not, to my knowledge, been used in any other game - in fact, I have almost no idea how anything like this could be applied to any genre other than visual novels or adventure games, without it merely coming off as a highly restricted quick-save system (and the players, understandably, crying bloody foul over it).
This brings to mind the quandary I touched upon in the very first paragraph: why, of all things, did the most interesting plot device I've seen in a game in years...have to be attached to an adults-only visual novel? Granted, the sex scenes do bear the very slightest amounts of character development which would have been awkward in any other context (however, I'm told that the Sega Saturn port, which omits these scenes, was able to get by just fine story-wise, though is otherwise quite an inferior version of the game), but really, all this seems to have done is greatly limit the game's audience after the fact. Sure, the game probably wouldn't have sold anything had the developer not marketed it to "those" sorts of people, and likely would have faded into obscurity...but now that it's available in English (thanks to those kind folks at TLWiki), and English-speaking countries have very different attitudes towards sexual content in media...especially in regards to some of the situations in which it occurs in a game like YU-NO...
...Sigh. Now nobody's going to take this post seriously.
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