why don't modern western games have bad endings anymore? why aren't I allowed to fail anymore?
thank nippon that VNs still have them a lot of the time.

stories with bad endings are always going to be more niche. Average person doesn't want to spend a bunch of money and time only to be left unsatisfied in the end. The number of movies with happyn endings is greater than those with "bad" or ambiguous ones. It takes more skill to pull off an impactful bad end, when it's done well they tend to be all time classics like chinatown for movies or shadow of the collosus in gaming. But if you do it badly it can just come off as edgy for the sake of being edgy.

To be clear i don't mean /only/ bad endings. I mean the current game over state is just kinda boring.
like in a game where you have to defend villagers from some monsters. the only conditions are the 1 prescripted success (or sometimes prescripted failure, even in spite of the potential of you overwelmingly winning) or game over try again. sometimes there's timers for "escape the exploding base" but again, failure state is game over, success is leave and base explodes. Back to the village defense. why not have degrees of failure or success. Yes you won, but 40% of the villagers you meant to save died, -> consequence to that.

And obviously the reason they don't do stuff like this is combinatorial explosion. but hell even something like Dragon's lair made failure more interesting without exponential game states to keep track of.

Game over only really works as a fail state when the design of the game can make continuing meaningful. For example a game that only lets you continue a certain amount of times before kicking you back to the beginning. A game that lowers or resets your score when you continue. Or, as was the case with arcade games, a game that makes you pay real money to continue. If the structure of the game is just a series of challenges or choices to try over and over again until you win, then the game is likely pretty boring in the long run. Games like these might actually benefit from leaning more into adventure/rpg design to create challenges based around lateral thinking or riddles, or create a scenario system that can account for the player's actions. But that's obviously more difficult and costly.

Another option is to create highly prescriptive situations for the player but make them thematically meaningful within the context of the game's story. Hanachirasu is a good example. It's a mostly linear story with only a few decision points for the player. If the player makes a choice that leads the main character to stray from his rematch with his fated rival, the story wraps up very quickly and unsatisfyingly. This style of gameplay (pick the right choice or the game just ends) would otherwise not be very engaging but hanachirasu uses such design to create an interactive story where the player can never be satisfied except by revenge and death. The game asks whether the player will embrace or deny the unique feeling of satisfaction that comes only from revenge.

In table top rpgs you will often have wordage for the gm to consider the option of failure to do something as an opportunity for different things to occur. For example, a party wipe leading instead of death and creating new characters, rather being captured and thrown into a dungeon and needing to plot an escape. Something like baulder's gate 3 I think does this kind of thing well. You can fail many actions, quests etc. It doesn't lead to game over and reload it just leads to a different game state. Of course this requires a pretty dedicated team to pull off. Mass effect tried to do something like this, and only had middling success on the whole.

4 That hanachirasu game sounds pretty interesting in that regard. making the choice deliberate on the player to pursue revenge is something that could really only be explored as a game. And that is I think where the core of this feeling of not being able to fail in games being kinda shitty stems. Why play a game where all the outcomes are predetermined?

Yes, there is something satisfying about accomplishing a challenge, games like souls/eldenring/sekiro have that mechanical progression the player goes through, in this case having bad ends might be a bad move, but maybe not? The soul games specifically have this idea of undeath and loops, so being dragged to some pit you have to crawl out of and a gauntlet you have to pass to return to where you were could work, but most people would probably find that annoying. Then again the mechanical progression is undercut by the leveling systems and the op loot drops found through exploring so why not have death literally be a power up. Those who die the most in such games and just want to see it can by dieing enough to be strong enough to win, without skill. Those who want to flex would need to prove their worth with no death runs.
Also exploring a world and learning a story piece by piece can be fun in and of itself, but then why bother with a failure state at all, outer wilds for instance goes this route and does it very well imo.

When a game is a better experience as a supercut on youtube, then something has gone wrong. Interactivity needs consequences to be meaningful and not all consequences can be good, and games must be interactive. "light needs the dark"

>>5

Also exploring a world and learning a story piece by piece can be fun in and of itself, but then why bother with a failure state at all

This. Exploration/adventure/story games don't really benefit from fail states. It's actually the opposite, these games benefit the most when they have few or no game over states like op was getting at with visual novels, instead continuing into a state reflective of the player's actions and decisions.

Funny you mention sekiro cuz that game was actually pretty successful at making death meaningful in an adventure game context. If you look at the overall structure of the game it's basically an adventure game or simple rpg where the core progression is talking to people to get hints about what to do, or finding items and giving them to people. But the more you die, the more people get cursed, locking you out of interacting with them. So the combat aspect of the game is actually related to being able to complete the different questlines and endings. It's a good solution, cuz yes, the combat is ultimately about just trying over and over again till you win with no scoring system or any metric for player performance, but death still has meaning and consequence.

>>5
what you describe in the first paragraph of your post is present in this action-rpg called Outward. getting knocked out will have different results based on when, where and how it happened. got your head smashed in by bandits? wake up in their lair as a prisoner or slave. got pinched by a giant hermit crab on the beach? wash ashore near a fishing village. it's not always a 100% chance to get a result from a specific KO situation, sometimes you'll get other results like waking up in a camp that someone set up when they found you and they'll have left some tea and snacks for you, or if you're playing on hardcore mode every knockout has a small chance to result in save deletion. waking up in a bad situation after failure is fun. it gives meaning to failure. there are also a few quests that can be failed but failure only leads to different outcomes and consequences. Outward has issues though, and not minor ones at that. the combat is clunky and not in a good way, and most of the story elements failed to catch my interest. but it's still a pretty good game. apparently there's a sequel coming, hopefully it's more of the same but better and with less story.
Kenshi also does this. in Kenshi, the only true end (good or bad) to a game is when you're dead, but dying is pretty hard. you'd have to get knocked out in a bad place, like alone in the desert or near a pack of hungry carnivores. most knockouts end up with you waking up in a slave camp or city jail, depending on why and by whom you've been sent to sleep. being a slave is actually one of the best outcomes during the early game when you're weak and frail since your slavers will feed you and the work that they force you to do enables you to develop muscle mass, plus you can practice combat and lockpicking while you're there.

i like the way that Receiver 2 handles player death. in this game, you have to collect audio cassettes in order to rank up, while avoiding killdrones that take the form of turrets and flying taser drones, while being equipped with nothing but a handgun, and that handgun is where the core mechanics of the game are concentrated. it is difficult to handle at first because every operation of the weapon has a keybind, but once you get a hang of it it feels really natural. for example, reloading a semi-automatic necessitates four different keys and at least twelve keypresses whereas in most games it necessitates only one. each rank brings new and more enemies as well as a few changes to the level generation. rank up five times and you win. each death bumps your rank down by one. when you're at the lowest rank, death does nothing other than reset your rank progress. it is quite simple but it succeeds in making the player fear death. another mechanic from that game that has good synergy with this rank system is that death is very easy to bring upon yourself. getting shot, even only once, will kill you. falling from twice your height will kill you (shout out to games with intense fall damage, gotta be one of my favorite genders). shooting yourself in the foot twice (once with high-caliber handguns) will kill you. glass shards falling on you will kill you. shooting metal can make your bullet ricochet, which can kill you if it hits you. it is easy to fail but the only punishment to failure is a temporary loss of progress, and you're also rewarded for reaching the same higher rank multiple times by unlocking new handguns, so if you want to unlock all of them you will need to fail multiple times.