Having played a fair number of visual novels, I end up talking about plot, and when it comes to scenario structure there are basically two directions. One is the suspenseful gamble-and-court-death kind, where you manufacture some huge news, some big twist, build up a ridiculously hype mystery at the start, then line up some hype developments and one hell of a reveal at the end. The other is the utterly ordinary school romance slice-of-life, maybe with a little friction over life, studies, and club activities, which gets resolved on the way to the ending. Personally I like the first one, but not everyone can pull off big news, and running faster than everyone else won’t get it done either. Suspense and crazy twists demand a seriously strong scenario writer to handle—pacing, laying the mystery, arranging the different routes, all of it is interconnected, and one wrong step leads to every step being wrong. Plenty of people crash on the first type, drawing a tiger and ending up with a dog, or the story is passable but the writing can’t carry it, so the mystery lands with no impact, or is outright incomprehensible, and a good premise and story go to waste. The second type is way simpler—at least you won’t cause a disaster just by writing it casually. It can produce great stories too, provided you’re a gag writer good at digging up the fun in everyday life; Yukikoi Melt and The Shepherd of the Great Library are pretty solid examples of the latter. Still, it’s actually hard to completely botch the second type. Compared to walking the tightrope of suspense, everyday content is safer. Or rather, slice-of-life games don’t ask much of the plot anymore—a lot of people are probably more into the character designs and the CV performances. It’s not just games; anime mostly runs on the same rhythm. Some live on plot, some live on slice-of-life, and you can see how hard it is to nail the former. Kantai Collection went for a crazy twist and got called “shit-feeding,” while Gochuumon wa Usagi desu ka? does daily moe and gets called “healing”—the difference in their setups isn’t even that big, they just chose different scenario routes. Of course, for some studios, botching a twist-heavy scenario naturally makes them think, once bitten twice shy, might as well fall back on slice-of-life for safety. Like Parasol’s QUINTUPLE☆SPLASH!.