Leaderboard

Amusingly, the ladder-style structure reflects real life by far the best. I mean, what's more realistic: 1.) You meet five interesting girls in a disco and you either decide for one of them over the course of a few weeks or you'll be single forever. 2.) You meet an interesting girl in a pub and the situation could have gotten tense, but somehow the chemistry wasn't perfect. But a few months later you meet another girl at work and you're head over heels into her immediately. Then you meet another girl a year ago in holidays on Mallorca, but since you've already decided for the girl at work, nothing came out of it. But if you would have decided against the girl at work before, things might have gone different with the girl in Mallorca. That's simply life. You just don't meet all interesting people at the same time.

Those rare exceptions are more or less stories written well, or at least well enough to fit into ladder-style storytelling. Majority of games are simply horribly thought out and written; all thanks to those pathetic writers, who literally have no idea how to adopt their excuse of a story into visual novel medium.

I never concern myself about which routes are canon, which are impossible, etc. I treat all routes exactly the same, whether they're in a typical multi-route moege or if it's g-senjou no maou. It's all fiction, it's all fake, none of it ever feels "real" to me in the context you describe. So I don't get bothered by some routes obviously taking a backseat to others in a game's canon. The only time that bothers me is when it's clear those routes had very little effort put into them and they feel like stub routes. G-Senjou no Maou's routes were pretty much fine in this regard, they all told somewhat involved and interesting stories, even if the most complicated story was obviously the true route. In Eustia, I've only played the partial patch so I've only read the Fiona route, which was really disappointingly short and uneventful. It's not the fact that the game will move on and progress the story past those points which bothers me, it's the fact that Eustia's routes are just bad which bothers me.