~bartender, please serve me the exact cocktail I need to drink at this moment. I refuse to give further information about my preferences.
--
For the couple of months, I've been playing a lot of narrative-heavy games: 'Ghost Trick', 'Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney', 'Heaven's Vault' (slow Indiana Jones in space), 'Va-11 Hall-A', and all three 'Coffee Talk' games. I'm currently in the middle of 'Coffee Talk Tokyo'.
I've found the 'Coffee Talk' games an exceptionally rich seam, which is encouraging me to go back to my own writing and try something that accumulates meaning through discrete episodes and conversations, just as 'Coffee Talk' does. This feels much more approachable than planning another novel as a whole. I'm also intrigued by the way that conversation stories are a very old pattern: you can look back at least as far as the Platonic dialogues, for example.
And then, of course, there are bartender stories, which look like a genre in themselves. 'Coffee Talk' looks like it builds on 'Va-11 Hall-A', and the games take inspiration from the 'Bartender' manga (where Ryû Sasakura mixes therapeutic drinks with Sherlock Holmes levels of implausible perceptiveness) and, I hear, 'Midnight Diner'.
That name makes me wonder about this place. 'Midnight Pub' ... 'Midnight Diner'. Was that an inspiration?
There are personal story arcs recorded here, I'm sure. Has anyone else here found themselves intrigued by bartender stories?