Criticisms for the series

By playing Team 1's story first, you are introduced to Team 2 as friendly characters, Team 4 as antagonistic characters, and Team 5 as characters with some kind of knowledge of what's going on. The ending ties into supernatural elements and foreshadows that there's more to be learned, which a player would infer that they could find in another route of the game.

From there, you might be inclined to play any one of their stories. To make things more like a game proper, let's say 1-3 are the starting teams, 4-5 are unlocked after beating the three of those, and 6 after all five. This now gives the player objectives and goals to accomplish, which is a big part of game design to consider. Rather than offering all of them at once, now the player's options are much less daunting, but not only that, this can be used to benefit the player as well.

Returning to the example, by playing through 1, out of your initial options, only 2 was initially available, so maybe you'll be more inclined to go for them next. Alternatively, maybe you want to go to 3, as they're someone completely new. Either way, your curiosity will likely surely be whet for 4 and 5, so knowing they're unlockable, if nothing else, you now have the goal of unlocking their paths.

By playing 3's story, despite not having the most serious story compared to others, you still learn more about Team 5's history and origins (which I mistakenly wrote as 6 at the end of their first chapter), and you'll see more hints that Team 4 might not be as in control as they might appear in 1's story. Both of these things will be big later on.

2's story is there to provide balance to the game's largely more serious atmosphere, as this series is about balance, or so I've been told, and maybe could have these characters learning about the supernatural things without actually getting involved with Team 4 like in the other stories, so it provides education, so to speak, while still being unique in its own right. 5 might make some appearances here due to how they're involved in the supernatural part of the story, and 1 would naturally appear because they're friendly with 2. If you play this one first, you then have reason to be interested in 1 and 5 at the very least, as well as reason to be happy when 2 shows up in other stories, and you have some knowledge you might not have going into the other stories that you do by playing this one. We could also see more perspective on the 1 and 2 relationship, maybe taking a chapter to rewind and take place before the game's events, for example. This could be used to catch players up, if these are returning characters, or help establish an established relationship.

Once those are out of the way, we now have access to 4 and 5. By this point, if we've played through the first 3, we now have sufficient reason to play through either one.

In 4's story, we learn that there's been a lot going on behind the scenes, and the characters who we thought were villains are actually victims. By we players taking control of them, we allow them a moment of rebellion before the end, and by playing as them even when they're being controlled, we can feel the same struggle they feel, as now we've been forced to do something we may not want to as well. In 5's, this team could delve into what's really going on with 4 and they could represent the "out of the know" teams finding out the shock of 6 being behind things, perhaps by having 3 be the victims of 4 and 6 here. This is important because a player could pick either 4 or 5 first once they become available, and so making sure to convey both sides - 4's side and everyone else's - is important.

Then there's 6. At this point, you've now played through every story, seen all the trials and tribulations of these characters, and probably don't like that you're playing as the villains - which is an important thing to do with "dark" parts of games. It's said that with horror games, the most important part is to make players do things they don't want to do. Likewise, to see this through to the end, players will need to play as the very villains that they probably want to beat up most of all by this point. It both offers an option, as people are often drawn to villains, and it allows us to explore the last piece of the puzzle that makes up the game's story as a whole.

If you'd like, let's say we could assume 6 is the "true" story path. While I'm not necessarily a fan of that school of game design with games with multiple paths, we could still go there. After we see things from 6's perspective, maybe with 6 seemingly coming out victorious, the last chapter opens up. By this point, we've learned things about all of the teams, their motivations, what they know, and while not every team might know everything about the situation, we, the player, do.

The last chapter could play out with all the teams gathering together and pooling their power into one team to go off and fight. This could either be the "main" team, or the last cutscene could trail off with a "The ones who should go will be..." moment and turn to a character select. Then perhaps it could have you up against a monster of some kind, combining the frantic "survival mode" elements of the Daidouji/Rin battles in Burst with some of the series' monstrous bosses.

To top it off, we have the individual story modes complimenting all of this, which primarily offer character relationships forming, insight into characters, and things like that. Maybe SV's take on this concept wasn't the best, but I still stress that these can be used to add to the experience as a whole. No, they're not necessarily tied to the larger story that the story modes are all telling, but they're tied to the characters you meet throughout and that in itself is something that they add - it allows you to learn more about them, to get to know them better, and to form a relationship between them. Not like a waifu and husbando thing, but the relationship all consumers of fiction have with their medium of choice - these simply allow you to deepen those bonds, and I think that's fairly harmless. It's not like Persona's social links or a story-capable fighting game's arcade modes ever truly tie into the stories much, but you can bet they'll often add a lot to the characters they revolve around.

In essence, because games are more than just books or TV shows, you can create this kind of storytelling. It's something only games can do, and games can do so much more than that - they can do so much more than just a story that goes in a straight line. This is not really a novel concept - I've played fighting games that have a similar way to tell their stories, for example.

To bring up one specific example, while early BlazBlues went further and used time loops and such to really tie everything together in that it all happened sort of, the premise was still ultimately the same in that all the varying stories earlier in, while not necessarily matching up, provide the player with information in regards to the major story at hand as a whole, and in turn, tell them a whole story through pieces. It's something only video games can do, and yes, maybe we shouldn't jump right to 6 teams and 30 characters until SK's writers prove they can handle a smaller number, but to suggest that the concept can't work is, and I mean no offense, disrespectful to people who write for video games and even game designers, as these are decisions that take place on the gameplay level too.