Poking around on Yoko Taro's twitter, earlier today he was doing a really interesting ramble on American VS Japanese RPG design

Summary as best I can parse it:

>Western RPGs are about interaction between player and world, Japanese RPGs are about interaction between protagonist and characters

>Opening question: Why is the level of player freedom in JRPGs so low?

>His experience from making them: It's difficult to do have broad freedom of choice in character-drive RPGs because the more events are non-deterministic, the less your characters can talk about them

>For example, if the heroine gets a life-threatening injury, then you stop and go do a bunch of meandering sidequests, the dialogue starts to desync from the action

>He refers to this kind of thing as "emotional bugs"

That is really interesting

>The two most common countermeasures for this are "characters don't talk about emotions" or "you aren't allowed actions that impact emotions"

>Also, the more freedom of action a player has in an RPG, the less you can use foreshadowing or endgame plot twists to your advantage

>The typical old school Open World flow is to have several linear plot threads you can pursue at your leisure, then when you reach the ending you throw out anything incomplete for the endgame thread

>Most "Open world" RPGs are actually several linear quests in the same world, whereas 'true' freedom would look more like Minecraft

or the real world

>Whether or not something could have that level of freedom and still be called an RPG is a mystery

>He thought about it and kind of wants to make an ultra-high freedom RPG in a harem light novel esque setting

>The protagonist has almost no personality, and the world is abnormally populated by beautiful girls who like him, but none of them can ever hook up with him

>In this closed world, it may be possible to act with freedom

>I have no idea what the fuck Yoko Taro's going on about at this point???

That's.... Huh

A harem game where you can't harem

???

I kind of like it

In a fucked up way I get where that's going