I swear I didn't pick an anime visual novel to coincide with Jeff and Dan's Anime 101 panel at Anime Expo this week, especially given how little I'd want to type a sentence that said "anime" three times, but it is true that I've been meaning to check out more visual novels of late. I've been interested in how much gameplay and interactivity plays a role in some of the big-name VNs, and how that often correlates to the minimal amount of same in "walking simulators" like Dear Esther and Gone Home (despite the fact that fans of the prior genre tend to be very critical of the latter, blind to their own hypocrisy). That's part of a longer journey I've been on in the past decade into different ways video games (especially Indies) can tell stories as their primary directive, as an adventure game fanatic from far enough back when there were only the two types: games that emphasized story and characters that you had to progress with a text parser, and games that emphasized story and characters that you had to progress by pointing and clicking on things.

Fault Milestone One is a true, dyed-in-the-wool visual novel in the sense that there's practically zero interaction beyond clicking to get to the next dialogue box. There's exactly one choice in the game, the result of which I don't think makes much difference at all. In the most literal sense of the term, you're reading a book wherein various anime characters pop up whenever it's their turn to speak (or whisper in sotto voce [or think to themselves]). To abbreviate the story very quick: Princess Selphine and her bodyguard Ritona are the apparent sole survivors of an attack on Selphine's mana-infused country of Rughzenhaide, orchestrated by some powerful "manakravters" (as in, manacrafter or magic-user, but more Germanic - there's a lot of gratuitous German in anime, I've found). Ritona teleports the two of them out of there, but her contingency spell backfires and sends them halfway across the planet to a part of the world that has far less mana to work with, and so humanity there has learned to prosper through science and inventions instead. While there they meet a strange but friendly young woman named Rune and try and figure out a way home when the episode-specific arc (as opposed to the series-wide story of Selphine's pursuers) kicks in.

If this game is said to have any challenge, it's in parsing what's going on, keeping up with the game's jargon, and figuring out what all the different dialogue box types mean. It'll keep tossing around terms like "manakravte", "mind-dives", "aerolinguistics", "transidian" or "Sanne'Ajrizda" at an alarming frequency. It reminds me quite a lot of Tales of the Abyss (in more ways than one, in fact) and how frequently that game would get all jargon-heavy and you'd need to stop and pay attention when a crucial plot cutscene is rolling, only for the characters to drop it all in the next scene and go try on hats or eat bonbons or whatever cute slice-of-life anime shenanigans these games delve into during their downtime. It wouldn't be so bad if you learned all these terms in a more natural way, but even though Fault comes with its own in-game "encyclopedia" glossary it'll still halt conversations dead to explain the workings and origins of whatever magical concept is relevant to the current conversation. That aspect of the storytelling can be a little awkward as a result.

When the game gets going, though, and starts with the revelations and flashbacks, it becomes more engaging. This particular episode concerns Rune and her origins, and the game spends an incredibly long time - though in terms of a full novel, it's probably just the first third of the book or so - on the backstory of her, her CEO brother, their deceased parents, their CTO mentor, the various other folk living in the town of Kadia where the protagonist duo teleport close to, and eventually bring back the mysterious assailants from the prologue as a cliffhanger for Fault Milestone Two. In some ways, acclimatizing players to all this magical lingo by starting in a non-magical town is a smart move, in part because the more magically-inclined can explain how everything works to those that are less so without it feeling too much of a expository plot contrivance for the reader's sake, but also because it helps ground the inaugural adventure of this party before the shit hits the fan and more intricate magic gets involved. It's a fairly grim story too; one with violence and family drama that doesn't quite end well, but at least ends on a hopeful note.

All the same, I couldn't help feel while playing it that this was someone's epic JRPG that they couldn't make happen with the resources available to them, so they cut out the majority of what would cost money - the gameplay, the character models and animations, etc. - and kept the story. There are definitely times when I just want a JRPG to deliver the next block of story without forcing me to go through some kind of superfluous ice cave dungeon or boss encounter, but then the reverse is often true too (it also greatly depends on the JRPG and the comparative quality of its story and its combat/gameplay, to be fair). Fault Milestone One has a fine story that's told well, but it's on a considerably different plane than something like the Zero Escape games, or Ace Attorney, or Danganronpa, or even something like Doki Doki Literature Club with how your decisions made some small difference to the way the story unfolds in those games. I think if the story's good then that's all that really matters, but I might just stick to visual novels with a little more gameplay depth from this point onward. (Well, except that I'm kind of invested in Fault's story and characters now, so I might see about grabbing Fault Milestone Two eventually.)

Rating: 3 out of 5. (Though maybe add a point if minimally-interactive VNs are your deal.)