Gamer Diary: WILL A Wonderful World

Gamer Diary: WILL, A Wonderful World

One of the Switch’s real strengths this generation is just the sheer amount of visual novels being released for it. For decades, the genre had been largely overlooked when it came to being localized, and aside from a few choose-your-own-adventure style text games on the PC, was not a commonly created segment of games by the West either. Thankfully, this is not the case anymore, and while not every visual novel released on Steam is destined to be a classic icon of the genre, players like me who enjoy the style of playing now have a wide range of games to purchase. Including dozens that have physical releases and ports to the Switch. Because of that I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my eyes peeled online and at some of the more niche gaming places I go to to see what’s coming out and what looks good. And WILL, A Wonderful World was one of those games that kept popping up on my radar.

Though it looks and feels like your customary Japanese VN, WILL is actually Chinese in origin, but actually incredibly international in scope and story. As a pair of gods with the power to change people’s fates, you read prayers in the form of letters from various characters whose lives intertwine in unexpected but powerful ways. The game focuses mostly on nine characters who live in Beijing, Hong Kong and Korea who are all actually incredibly interesting, and the two gods’ attempts to fix their problems. The problems are fixed with the letters themselves, as swapping around key events within the letters, or mixing multiple characters’ letters together causes things to change, and this is where the challenge of the game lies. Fixing one character’s problems might screw the other character over, or cause changes in their fates later down the line that you might not see right away. Or you may have to solve puzzles based off of what the characters say they intend to do. While it might seem easy at first, it actually can get incredibly difficult, especially in the last act of the game when a timer starts and you have a limited amount of time to change things for the better one final time.

As far as visual novels go, WILL is actually more novel than visual, with very minimal artwork and imagery, and actually makes me feel a lot better about the amount of artwork I’ve created for Kaiju Crush, as at times working on my own game I worry that people won’t get enough content for their money. The sparse use of sprites and backgrounds isn’t a criticism, as the vivid descriptions in the letters, soundtrack and use of the vibration of the Switch pulls you into the story even if it doesn’t always spoon feed you the imagery that goes along with it. There are cut scenes for the most important (as well as some of the funniest) parts of each characters’ stories, and the sprites of the two gods are always used when not working on the letters themselves. The Switch port does have problems though, as my game would sometimes crash at inopportune times, and sometimes the vibration function would get stuck in a loop and I’d have to go to the home menu so my system wouldn’t shake apart. I haven’t installed the update for the game yet, so hopefully that will fix some of those glitches. There are some minor typos as well and some weirdly structured sentences that remind you that this work was translated, but is still not a complete disaster in localization as I’ve seen with some other recent visual novels.

The story itself is very compelling, though some people might find some of the plot lines themselves a bit squicky, such as the story of the girl and her art teacher. This game isn’t eroge, so you don’t have to worry about strong sexual content or nudity, though there are some pretty graphic descriptions of violence. There is also quite a bit of queer content, which is interesting as most of it isn’t played for a joke though a lot of it still falls into the Kill Your Gays trope. There is one mildly satisfactory conclusion to one of the queer story lines, but overall don’t expect a lot of overly saccharine happy endings for any of the characters. Even the ‘good’ ending to the story is very bittersweet, but sometimes a story doesn’t need everything to be wrapped up with a neat bow to be satisfying and poignant.