I've been watching Giri / Haji and the conflicts in this show are so deeply-rooted in its straightforward characters who, for the most part, plainly state what they are going to do, and then do them.

Sometimes they will do them without the statement first. But they cut to the chase.

Videogame stories feel full of fluff, misdirection, and alternatively: pushovers, or indomitable institutions. The player character makes things happen, within limits. The other characters are fingers of a mastermind - the game itself, its plot, its story, its rules may occasionally throb with life if I'm lucky, but it's a maddeningly rare moment when a videogame convinces me to care about a person within its circle.

More often than not, their motivations are merely alluded to, & the causality of their actions is either unclear or unbelievable -- it happens off-camera, or grotesquely on-camera, in a cutscene that disrespects the playable nature of the medium.

I want to make a game where the characters travel well-worn paths that you see plainly laid out ahead of you; where your actions have personal consequences not buried in the sand of abstract systems or dispensed as a breathable aerosol for you to waft into your nostrils and merely catch the scent of or divided into twenty recordings spread across the land for you to discover and listen to at your leisure or possibly not discover at all,

but where a person tells you specifically and directly that what you do will drive them to do something else and where you get to watch it unfold with a devastating certainty.