Heart of the Woods' Mechanically Unusual Choice System

 This entry contains minimal story spoilers for Heart of the Woods, but it does discuss how the game works, so proceed with care.

Choice is a major factor in visual novels. This level of interactivity not only distinguishes them from kinetic novels, but also allows the player to decide what ending the characters get. Heart of the Woods has a unique system in which your individual choices matter less compared to what combination of choices you make.

Choice in Visual Novels

In most visual novels, your choices affect the story in various ways. I will use Katawa Shoujo as an example, citing examples of choices without spoiling the plot.

Some choices have an immediate and noticeable impact on the plot. For example, in Shizune's route, there is only one choice to make- picking the right option will get you the good ending and the wrong one will get you the bad ending. Without spoiling anything, the choice is obvious- maybe "comfort" is used euphemistically, but it's obviously the wrong thing to do.

Other choices will have subtler effects. For example, in Emi's route, picking the right option with an earlier scene with your teacher Mutou will unlock an additional option late in the route that will provide another path to the good ending. Don't despair if you made the wrong choice at first; there will be another chance for those who make the wrong choice. On the other hand, in Lily's route, there are three plot-critical choices(among other trivial choices) and making the wrong choice for any of them will get you the bad ending, although you won't realize which ending you got until late in Act 4.

Other choices will affect relationship values or trigger flags that are invisible to the players. In Act 1, some choices will get you "points" with Shizune or Lily and Hanako.

1. If you agree to Mutou's request for you to introduce yourself, you get a point with Shizune.
2. If you ask Shizune about the library, you get a point with Hanako and Lily. If you don't have any questions, you get a point with Shizune.
3. If you play aggressively in Risk, you get a point with Shizune.
4. If you apologize for startling Hanako, you get a point with her and Lily.
5. If you tell Kenji that Hanako was cute, you gt a point with her and Lily.

When Hisao's deciding who to spend lunch with, you can spend lunch with Shizune if you have at least two points with her, and can spend lunch with Lily and Hanako if you have at least two points with them. If you want Shizune's route, you must have lunch with her and then take her side in the argument between her and Lily. If, however, you want Lily or Hanako, you must have lunch with them, then take Lily's side in the argument. If you do that, then your final choice for Act  I will be to decide which of the two you will spend the afternoon with, which determines which route you get.

Some aspects of the above are odd; Choice #1 happens before you meet Shizune, Choice #2 happens before you met Hanako and Lily, and Hanako is not in earshot for Choice #5. However, if you think about it, you'll have to make the choices the girl you want to pursue likes if you get onto the route.

Heart of the Woods' Choices

Now for Heart of the Woods. There are only three choices in the game, all of which happen while you're playing as Morgan.

The first choice occurs in Chapter 3, and you can choose whether Morgan decides to be strong for Tara. There is no apparent immediate effect to this choice, much like the plot-critical choices in Lily's route.

The second choice, in some ways, is most important. Similar to the first choice, you can choose whether Morgan is resolute or falls into despair. If you want the good ending, you will have to choose the opposite choice as your first choice; if you chose to be strong for Tara, you must have Morgan despair, while if you chose to let Tara be, you must have Morgan seek to make the villain pay.

To use an analogy, it's a bit like trying to get both a heads and a tails within two flips of a coin. Your first flip doesn't matter on its own; it only determines what your second has to be. In the case of the second flip, there's a 50% chance of getting what you want. 

All this leads up to just before the climax in Chapter 6. At that point, you will have two or three out of four choices.

1. "You're right" gets you the good ending.
2. "I promise I'll make it up to you" gets you the "Sacrifice" ending.
3. "One way or another, it ends tonight" gets you the "Freedom" ending.
4. "I'll keep Tara safe" also gets you the Freedom ending.

If you made the right combination of choices, you will get Choices 1-3, but if you made a wrong combination, you will get Choices 3-4. It's somewhat disappointing that in the latter case, you choice doesn't even matter, although this may have been the game's way of showing you that you made a wrong choice somewhere. The artbook had a third planned bad ending, so perhaps that might have been accessed by choosing Choice #3 or Choice #4.

Speaking of the artbook, it explains the reasoning behind this mechanic. To sum it up, Morgan has forced herself to be strong all her life, hiding away her weakness. She must strike a balance between forcing herself to be strong and relying on Tara. It's an interesting rationale, but it's a bit counterintuitive.

Of course, it's easy enough to brute-force your way to a good ending. Simply go back to the second choice and make a different decision as the first time, then choose the options that become available.

Conclusion

Heart of the Woods' system for determining the ending is nontraditional, but it works in the context of the story, albeit requiring the creators' explanations to be fully understood. The choices lack immediate consequences, but the same can be said of other visual novel choices, such as Lily''s choices. While Heart of the Woods is not the most famous visual novel out there, perhaps other companies could take cues for how it does things and follow its example, albeit with slightly more in-game transparency.