The best visual novels are fondly remembered for their captivating stories, but you won’t hear much praise for their gameplay. Most visual novels boil down to reading, making a few choices, and… well, not much else. However, one iconic feature continues to elevate their storytelling above all other genres.
Flowcharts Reveal the Extent of Your Choices
Visual novels come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from short, hour-long adventures to hundred-hour epics with enough words to fill multiple full-length novels. Obviously, most of your time will be spent reading, but many visual novels will also require you to make tough choices that will dramatically affect the outcome of your story. Sometimes, a single choice can decide which events play out for the next dozens of hours or bring your journey to an abrupt end.
Even a seemingly inconsequential choice may secretly influence your relationships with different characters or subtly shape the protagonist’s personality—though not always in a positive way. Every decision will determine how your story unfolds and how it ends. Depending on your choices, two routes in the same game can depict drastically different versions of the same events or lead you into entirely separate plot lines. Either way, making different choices will help you learn more about a game’s characters and uncover additional information that you may have missed on your first playthrough.
To help you keep track of all these decisions and diverging story paths, many modern visual novels feature a flowchart, which charts the choices you made and the branching pathways you have (or could have) followed. Flowcharts show exactly where a story can diverge, how certain choices affect your playthrough, and which scenes you missed. More importantly, the flowchart also allows you to return to any point in a story that you’ve already experienced. Thankfully, this means you don’t have to replay the entire game just to see different endings; you can just jump to any previous scene and start exploring the other story routes.
Besides being a helpful tool, flowcharts make revisiting visual novels a lot more enjoyable. While it’s always best to go in blind for your first playthrough of any visual novel, trying to uncover every ending and hidden scene without any guidance can quickly start to feel like a chore. However, filling out a flowchart makes the process feel much more rewarding (and easier), especially if you’re a completionist.
It should be noted that you won’t find flowcharts in every visual novel. The vast majority of games in the genre are mostly linear, offering a few minor choices (or sometimes none at all) throughout their stories. Even some of the largest visual novels of all time don’t have flowcharts, and most games lacked the feature until it was popularized by the Zero Escape series. Before then, most 50+ hour visual novels like the original versions of Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime left you in the dark about how your choices impacted the story, and your best bet for obtaining every ending was to rely on fan-made guides that contained their own flowcharts.
Thankfully, flowcharts are starting to become the standard in choice-heavy games and even recent re-releases of older visual novels. While not every game has them, that’s largely because many games don’t need them. But for the rare games that last for hundreds of hours—and even shorter experiences wherein your choices matter—you can usually expect to find a flowchart.
Flowcharts Are More Than a Convenience
As helpful as flowcharts can be, they probably don’t seem very interesting by themselves. Sure, the concept of jumping between different timelines and seeing every possible outcome of your actions sounds like the premise of an awesome sci-fi story, but it rarely has any bearing on the plot. However, that’s not the case for every game, and some visual novels use this seemingly mundane feature to break the rules of conventional storytelling.
428: Shibuya Scramble is one of the earliest visual novels to build its story around a flowchart, though not in the way you would expect. Instead of a single flowchart showing every branching pathway in a story, 428 presents its narrative across five separate timelines, each one following a different protagonist.
The decisions you make in one character’s story will influence the events of another route, and you’ll need to frequently jump between the different timelines to help all five protagonists survive to the end of the day. Even the most mundane choices in one route—whether that’s handing out a free drink to a homeless man or choosing to send an email—can have catastrophic consequences for someone else’s story. The constant character-swapping gives 428 a breakneck pace that’s rarely seen in visual novels and ensures there’s never a dull moment in its story.
428: Shibuya Scramble
- Released
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December 4, 2008
- ESRB
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T // Blood, Drug Reference, Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence
- Developer(s)
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Spike Chunsoft, Abstraction Games
- Publisher(s)
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Spike Chunsoft
However, most modern iterations of the flowchart took their inspiration from the Zero Escape trilogy. Each entry centers around nine people who have been captured by the mysterious “Zero” and forced to work together (or against each other) to escape a mysterious facility. The Zero Escape games are notorious for the dizzying number of unique choices and branching paths they provide, but their clever use of flowcharts sets them apart from the rest of the genre.
The first two installments, 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, feature multiple challenging puzzles that can’t be immediately solved, requiring you to find their solutions by exploring other routes on the flowchart. The series also features a few shocking plot twists that will permanently change the way you view their flowcharts, but I won’t spoil those here.
The flowchart serves another purpose in the third game, Zero Time Dilemma. Unlike the first two entries, ZTD presents its story in fragments that don’t follow a fixed chronological order, and you’ll have to see where events fall on the flowchart to understand the true sequence of events—some of which aren’t even part of the same timeline. Although this may sound like the recipe for a confusing mess, ZTD‘s flowchart ties its fragmented narrative together to deliver a captivating, one-of-a-kind thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat as you slowly piece together its mind-boggling story.
Zero Time Dilemma
- Released
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June 28, 2016
- ESRB
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m
- Developer(s)
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Spike Chunsoft
- Publisher(s)
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Aksys Games
That doesn’t mean flowcharts always have to be convoluted labyrinths of branching storylines and complicated lore. Although games like 428 and the Zero Escape series demand that you keep track of multiple timelines and a seemingly endless supply of loose plot threads—some of which won’t be acknowledged again until hours later—most visual novels are mercifully straightforward.
The murder mystery Raging Loop is one of the best games to follow in the footsteps of Zero Escape without also trying to turn your brain into mush. Raging Loop centers around a remote village that’s caught in the middle of a ritualistic curse, wherein a group of mysterious “wolves” living among the residents begin killing one villager each night. You take on the role of an outsider who picks the worst possible time to visit this creepy remote village and must now stop the wolves before the humans are wiped out. Unfortunately, your bad luck turns even worse when you’re murdered on the very first night.
This is where Raging Loop‘s brilliant twist on the flowchart introduces itself, as death isn’t the end of the story. It soon becomes clear that your character is trapped in a time loop, and they carry over their memories of past loops into each new timeline. Using your strange new power, you must solve the nightly murders, find a way to break free of the curse, and keep as many people alive as possible, all while trying to survive.
But sometimes, the only way to gather answers in Raging Loop is by jumping off a cliff, getting mauled by wolves, or provoking someone into beating you to death. Raging Loop is a bizarre, often darkly funny adventure, but its unique framing of the flowchart is what makes it so memorable. Even when your choices end in the most horrific deaths imaginable, you might still be rewarded with clues that shed a little more light on the village’s mysterious curse.
Raging Loop
- Released
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October 22, 2019
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ // Blood, Crude Humor, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
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Kemco
- Publisher(s)
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Kemco, PQube
Most gaming genres don’t reward failure, but that’s what makes visual novels so engaging. Whether it’s the result of one bad choice or a string of poor decision-making, your actions often carry severe consequences. However, flowcharts alleviate the frustration that normally comes with failure, encouraging you to explore other choices without ever being punished too harshly for going down the wrong path.
Sure, your character might suffer a horrific fate because of your poor decision-making, but you won’t be losing any significant progress. If anything, visual novels enable you to progress through failure, which allows these games to deliver stories that no other genre is equipped to handle.
Flowcharts Shouldn’t End with Visual Novels
Visual novels certainly aren’t the only story-driven games that let you choose your own adventure, yet flowcharts are rarely seen outside the genre. Maybe it’s for the sake of immersion or because some games are too large to fit all your choice into a single diagram, but there are plenty of games that could easily be improved with the addition of a flowchart.
Most modern point-and-click adventure games aren’t far off from being visual novels. Aside from having larger budgets and better cinematics, series like Life Is Strange, The Dark Pictures Anthology, or basically anything developed by Telltale Games after The Walking Dead share a lot in common with a typical visual novel. Much like visual novels, these choice-driven adventure games center around making choices in dialogue and major story events, both of which can alter the story and send you one of multiple branching story paths.
Typically, the stories in these adventure games don’t have as much variation as you would normally expect from a visual novel. Regardless of your decisions, you will usually follow the same exact plot beats in every playthrough. However, that’s not the case for the entire genre, as games like Until Dawn and Man of Medan feature stories that can dramatically change based on your decisions. Not only can your mistakes result in permanent character deaths, but the loss of those characters will also affect later events in the story. Your decisions can shape their stories in numerous different ways, but seeing all the different outcomes would be much easier with a flowchart.
However, it’s not just traditional adventure games that could benefit from flowcharts. Fighting game franchises like Blazblue and Soul Calibur include surprisingly elaborate story modes with multiple routes and alternate endings, but they both require you to replay the entirety of their lengthy campaigns to see each route. This problem is especially frustrating in Blazblue: Calamity Trigger, in which certain story routes can only be accessed by completing the match with specific attacks.
Even single-player shooters may have a reason to use flowcharts. While the genre isn’t known for having elaborate branching storylines, Call of Duty: Black Ops II remains one of the only exceptions—even within its own series. Unlike any other Call of Duty campaign, Black Ops II features dozens of unique story routes and multiple opportunities to shape the story through various moral choices. Failing certain missions can also open up new story routes, leading to a different set of unique endings.
Flowcharts are an incredibly useful tool in any choice-driven game, but there are also some understandable reasons for their absence. Adding a flowchart to any role-playing game would be a nightmarish undertaking. Trying to fit the hundreds of choices the player can make throughout a 100+ hour campaign onto a single chart would be difficult enough, but developers would also have to consider the fact that players could tackle most quests in any order. Even the more linear experiences of games like Alpha Protocol and the Mass Effect series feature too many variables to track with a flowchart.
Smaller games may also omit flowcharts to keep players immersed in the story. In story-driven games like Life Is Strange or The Walking Dead, the flowchart would unintentionally highlight how little variation their stories actually contain, making your choices ultimately feel less meaningful. On the other hand, games like Black Ops II and Until Dawn don’t always inform you when your actions will impact the story, and the outcomes of certain choices serve as some of their best plot twists.
That’s not to say that flowcharts would outright ruin these games, but they would need to be changed to fit the storytelling of other genres. One possibility is for flowcharts to be locked off until you complete the game once, allowing you to enjoy a blind playthrough before you start pursuing alternate endings.
The other option would be to copy Detroit: Become Human, which divides its story into multiple chapters, each of which contains its own dedicated flowchart. While a game with as many diverging paths and narrative variations as Detroit: Become Human would normally seem impossible to track with a flowchart, the chapter-based format has all the advantages of a traditional flowchart without becoming too complicated to comprehend.
Despite all the advantages that most other story-driven games have over visual novels, it’s surprising to see so few games outside the genre make use of flowcharts. They may not belong in every game, but flowcharts could allow other gaming genres to deliver stories with the same level of ambition and creativity that defines the best visual novels.