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Craaaaawling in my skiiin.....

The feels.

The phrase is horrendous, ungrammatical. Every cell in my pedantic body protests against it, and threatens to tie my fingers into knots if I use it once more.

The feels, I type. So there, cells. =) The Holy Grail that every visual novel maker seeks to induce in a reader.

Because, at heart, what is a visual novel except a book with rudimentary gameplay elements pasted inside its cover?

Because it cannot coast on "fun gameplay" or "exciting battles" or "I'm going to take down that @#!$&!%@ boss even if it costs me all my lives / items", the visual novel lives and dies by the emotional reactions it evokes in the reader.

Sometimes the aim is laughter, but more often, the target is the feels.

And herein lies the rub, because when you're stacking your deck to elicit as many feels as possible (my cells and I have compromised on using the italics, so a truce prevails for now), then the result ends up feeling forced.

It's something like telling a feel-good story. Stack the deck too much, overload your story with trope after trope, cliche after cliche, and the end result is something like a diabetic patient's nightmare, a sugar overload that leaves you feeling vaguely nauseated rather than inspired or touched.

Admittedly, one man's feels are another man's Ugh, much ado about nothing. Emotions are subjective experiences, even if they have objectively measurable physiological concomitants. But the shorter your story, the less time you have to develop your characters, the less payload you can force it to carry. A Clannad, or even a Katawa Shoujo, is less likely to fail simply because its size and scope means that it can carry more of a load, and that it can get away with a few misfires and false notes if the overall effect is pleasing enough, or evocative of enough feels. Yet even there, there will be some sharp-eyed critics who will point their fingers at a derailed character here, an issue of consent there, and show even the most obstinate fan that a house of feels is often a house of cards when looked at closely enough.

And because of its size, Ribbon of Green - though excellently written and benefiting from good artwork - collapses under the weight of the feels-inducing material that it was made to carry. Can one build a rope out of spider webs, or a bullet-proof vest out of notepaper? Can a fifteen-minute game carry the immense load of self-sacrifice and selfless friendship across the fragile bridge of teenage high school drama?

Some of you may think so. I differ. It doesn't matter too much. The feels, like the Holy Grail, are elusive.

That said, Ribbon of Green is worth playing, if only as a lesson to aspiring writers. Don't try to cram enough material for a novelette into a short-short game, because it simply limits the space that you have to develop each element. What was meant to be a touching story with supernatural overtones may end up looking more like a bad Evanescence song, simply because space constraints forced you to tell, rather than show. It's not bad, but it simply wasn't meant to carry that weight. It's sad.

And that, to me, evokes more feels than the actual story Ribbon of Green is trying to tell...

...wait...

...was that the author's plan all along?

I turn around, but Ribbon of Green has run away without a trace, leaving me scratching my head.

Mildly recommended.