Goodbye Volcano High begins in a fascinating way. You start in media res, with a group of teenagers gathered around a bonfire on the beach. The point-of-view character, Fang, is holding a yearbook, and the others are discussing whether or not the book should be burnt. The player is then presented with two choices: “Hold on” and “Let go”. Once the choice is made, the game sends the story back eight months ago.
On the surface, it seems to be a smart way to communicate the player’s amount of agency in the choices they can make. There’s a suggestion that you have so much agency that even before the story has properly begun, you can change a huge, important outcome for which the context will be revealed to you at a later, triumphant moment. When that choice, and all the ones you made before, finally come into play.
And then the rest of the game brilliantly destroys that illusion of control.
One of the biggest criticisms Goodbye Volcano High has faced since launch is that there’s only one ending, and therefore, none of the choices the player makes matter. Despite most games only having one ending anyway, there’s a different expectation when it comes to choice-based narrative games. The player’s choices must be so impactful, so game-changing that there can be multiple endings based on them.
It's a genre standard when it comes to visual novels, dating sims, and the like. And it feels like Goodbye Volcano High is being seen and critiqued as a visual novel, despite developers KO_OP never claiming it to be one. This is a cinematic narrative game. The goals and gameplay are entirely different. You wouldn’t expect a cinematic game to follow the conventions of a visual novel any more than you would demand a car to be more like a mountain bike.
There’s a recurring theme in Goodbye Volcano High’s narrative about learning to let go. It’s a story about teenagers having their futures being robbed from them in real time because of circumstances well beyond their control. But the theme also comes up with Fang’s relationship with their best friend Trish, where Fang desperately tries to hold on to Trish when she’s trying to move on from the band to pursue her goal of being an entomologist.
As Fang, you can make many choices to improve your relationship with Trish. Favor her at every opportunity you can over everyone else, save Mango when she gets lost at school, play L&L with her and show how well you two work together, take on more burdens in the band so she doesn’t have to work so hard. Anything, everything to make sure Trish stays close.
None of this can change the outcome. Trish will still want to take a break from the band. And no matter how close or how distant the two are at the time, Fang will still take it poorly. Just like the asteroid ending the dinosaurs, this is an outcome the player can’t change.
Yet, the player does have agency.
Almost every choice the player makes affects the characters’ relationship with Fang, as measured by the game’s Affinity chart. It’s pulled up every time the player pauses the game, and visually shows how close each character is, emotionally, to Fang. They orbit an icon of Fang’s face, and the closer they orbit to Fang, the stronger their connection is. How close they are impacts many game-related unlocks, including flashbacks and photos, that you’d otherwise miss if you failed to foster certain relationships enough.
More vitally, the player’s choices can unlock different secret scenes throughout the game. Choosing to take Sage’s ambitions for being a chef seriously gives him the confidence to open up to Fang about his struggles with transitioning. Choosing to apologize to Naser for lashing out at him causes him to later come backstage at Battle of the Bands to give Fang some encouraging words. Choosing to sit with Rosa and Trish at the auditorium causes Rosa to meet up with Fang at their locker and engage in kind small-talk, showing Fang that she’s not trying to sabotage Fang and Trish’s friendship. These moments are all over, and they’re rewarding, as they give bigger context for who these characters are and what they see in each other.
Who Fang is closest to also changes who they can talk to after the bonfire argument in episode seven. It’s the final chance for the player to get some closure for each character, after everything they’ve been through and what they’re about to go through.
The choices matter to the characters, not to the player.
And finally, the player’s first choice comes back into play. If the player chose to “Let go”, they will see Fang drop the book into the fire. But if they chose “Hold on”, Fang will hesitate, and someone (either Trish, Naomi, or Naser) will encourage them to go through with it. No matter what you chose at the start, the book is burnt.
You can’t change the book’s fate any more than you can change the dinosaurs’ fate.
You can’t save them any more than they could have saved themselves.
The best you can do is bring them happiness and something that feels like closure before the end.
The choices mean nothing, yet mean everything.
So, if you felt that loss of control at this point, like nothing matters… congratulations, that’s exactly how the characters felt too. You are experiencing ART.
This, I think, is why tragedy stories need to be told more, especially in games. We live in an era where happy endings aren’t just expected, but demanded. “You can’t hurt or kill these characters! I love them too much!” Stories where beloved characters suffer, die, or otherwise don’t end up with a happy ending often lead to discontent and the creators receiving backlash.
And it’s frustrating to me as an aspiring writer and critic. If creatives aren’t allowed to tell all the kinds of stories they want, tragic or otherwise, then we leave it in the hands of corporate content mills to feed us bland, milquetoast stories where things pan out exactly as we expect them to with cheap fanservice (hello, comic book movies). As an audience, we are left unchallenged. It’s strange because people call out that kind of shallow media for what it is and demand better, but bristle at stories that go the distance. It’s like how people say they’re tired of cute, passive women in games and want them to be more assertive, but freak out when Princess Peach gets a slightly more determined expression on some box art.
This is why I think we need to make more games that push against preconceived notions. Goodbye Volcano High, at least from my perspective, shows the kind of stories that games can – and maybe should – be telling more, using the medium of the genre to invoke feelings you wouldn’t get by just watching someone else play it. If you’ve only experienced this game through YouTube clips or streams, I implore you to try it for yourself. It’s a very different experience, and I think a worthwhile one.
And also: I wouldn't want to live in a world where the asteroid misses depending on how nice Fang is to everyone. Imagine the discourse.
It was nice seeing so many of my own loose collections of thoughts about this game articulated so well here.
I understand the knee jerk reaction many players must've had to the story ending in this way. Even outside of just games, we want our choices to matter and we want to feel they make a difference, but I also feel like that instinctual reaction kind of misses the point of the experience as a whole.
Goodbye Volcano High confronts players with death as an inevitable absolute. It's a heavy topic, maybe the heaviest, especially considering how in this case, the world is not only figuratively, but also literally ending right along with you. But what this game remarkably does, to me, is to frame that existential dread within a narrative that is deeply life affirming.
Over the course of the game's runtime, in the face of the impending end of everything, almost every character you interact with deeply cares about something. Most of them are teenagers who are coming of age and are faced with defining for themselves what the trajectory of their lives will look like. They have hopes and dreams, and even if by the end of the story they know none of those will come to pass, they still have the option of caring about each other.
No story can ponder death without eventually saying something about life, and in this case what I took away isn't that "nothing matters in the end". Instead, I feel like the game makes it a point to show you that the choices you make in every moment, the experiences you share with others, and what you choose to care about all have intrinsic meaning and that they do matter.
There are no clean cut different endings in Goodbye Volcano High, but each player's experience of the ending is in fact different, albeit in a more granular way, in how they're framed by each choice that the player made, and each moment that they had leading up to the end.
And let me tell you, the amount of catharsis I felt going from choosing to hold on to the book at the beginning to feeling okay with letting go at the end, I think it did something to me - something profound, and I count that as an ending that's worthwhile.
Sorry to double-post Sinfest, but the ineptitude here is really something. This is a really basic and kind of non-partisan joke: Arizona is really slow at counting ballots and everyone’s getting old waiting to see who’s governor.
I don’t know why this joke needs four panels. It works just as well with two, or even one. Tats doesn’t add any new context with the extra panels, it’s just “Sure been a while” over and over. But despite the simplicity of this joke, Tats fucks it up in so many ways
1. You don’t have Kari Lake or Katie Hobbs’ names on the screen, and it’s not immediately obvious that’s who Tats drew, especially since he zombified them to keep with his weird visual metaphors. This means it reads like it’s the 2016 election, and Tats is saying elections will be bad in the future, so you read the whole strip, go “huh”? and have to reread it to figure out what’s going on
2. It’s the year 2106? Why not the year 2122? Apparently, it’s because Tats wanted to reference “It’s been 84 years” from the 1997 film Titanic, which is a bit of a meme, but now you need to mentally figure 2106 minus 84, which slows the comprehension of the strip
3. The old lady is drawn much more realistically, which is normally shorthand for being in “The Reality Zone”, which introduces more confusion.
4.
Despite introducing so much clunk into your simple joke for the sake of squeezing in Le Epic Meme, Rose in the movie scene is wearing a green dress, but the old lady in the strip is wearing a blue jacket, so you’ve invested heavily into a joke about “Remember thing?”, and then you got the thing wrong.
So ummmm you’ve seen the latest few sinfests right? And I don’t mean to taint your day, but his forums seem to be coming out fairly pro-Trump, “the election was rigged!” Etc.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
Sinfest has always been a right-wing comic that everyone mistook for a radfem comic because it was anti-porn.
Also the remaining readership is maybe slightly deranged.
They like to pretend it means Feminist so they can fool themselves and others into believing they’re Good People, but really they just can’t face the truth that they’re not.
I’m the Sinfest Guy who’s been writing about it for years and I’m just completely fucking lost as to why these two women who I think are supposed to represent the left and the right just disappeared. No idea why it happened in-story. No idea what it’s supposed to say. I got nothing. Lemme check the Sinfest forums in the hopes of getting a lead.
No replies, so it’s probably just the comic and maybe one sentence of reaction.
Um
UM
I can’t even zoom out Chrome enough to fit all 4,793 words of this post in a single screenshot. And yet, I feel like this image of a 4,793 word comment on a webcomic post is a better description of Sinfest’s true politics than anything I or Tats could say. Just pure fucking TimeCube nonsense.
“Was I oppressed? No. But I felt oppressed, and isn’t that the real oppression”
Sinfest is just Time Cube with better art and more bigotry.
latest Sinfest strip went from “Metaphors that function better as Rorschach tests because they’re so confusing” to “oh wow that’s super blatantly TERF”
anvilpro said to thewebcomicsreview:
Holy shit the other shoe dropped on Sinfest
In a weird way I’m actually kind of happy about this. I’ve spent years saying Tatsuya Ishida was transphobic and having to prove my case with long essays about how he did this, that and the other and placing it all in the greater context. Now I don’t have to. I can just point to this comic, the first Sinfest comic in years where there can be no confusion or ambiguity over what Tatsuya Ishida means.
Yeah it’s kinda weird lol. For the longest time, we’ve kinda been waiting for him to stop dancing around it, and then he just goes and drops all pretenses with an “I identify as an Attack Helicopter” styled ”joke” of all things.
