Visual Novel / WILL: A Wonderful World

Will (left) and Myth (right)

WILL: A Wonderful World / WILL：美好世界 is a Visual Novel developed and published by WMY Studio. Not to be confused with a Daisuke Namikawa movie, or a freeware fighting game by Ainefill.

Myth and Will (also called Willy) are two gods with the power to assist those that earnestly pray to a higher power. By rearranging the events that have occurred before a person's plea, they can drastically change its outcome. Sometimes, key moments can even be swapped between different characters. Their ultimate goal is to make as many people happy as they can, though this becomes increasingly difficult as their paths intersect and bigger problems arise.

Received a Nintendo Switch port on October 18th, 2018 and a Playstation 4 port on July 2, 2019.

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This story makes use of the following Tropes:

• Abusive Parents: Park Sang-Gun, whose first event is him as a child, dealing with his drunk father attempting to strangle his mother to death. However, Sang-Gun's version of events might not match reality, due to mental issues caused by his mother.
• And the Adventure Continues: Ultimately, most characters either have a goal or gain an ability that doesn't end when their story does (Chang's justice, Jimmy's shrinking, Wen Zhaoren's return to art in his ending), or they don't quite achieve their main goal but are still optimistic about what's to come (Li Wen in her ending, Carlos and Hotaru's searches for Alicia).
• Another Side, Another Story: Sometimes, Myth and Will receive pleas from people first encountered in other characters' story lines. For example, a few letters after meeting Busan Police Unit 4's newest recruit Chang Gyeong-Min, they receive letters from Chang's new boss Kang Baek-Ya that offer a different perspective on Chang's job.
• Bedmate Reveal: One of Pi's events has him waking up after spending the night in bed with Kang Baek-Ya.
• Book Ends:
  • Li Wen's story begins and ends with her practicing tennis on an abandoned court. At least, until Will starts doing the editing.
  • Jimmy starts off stalking Li Wen in his first letter (which she believed was possibly from a Serial Killer), and at the end of his story, he's the one being stalked, by a Serial-Killer Killer no less
  • The game as a whole starts with an urban legend about praying to gods to change fate, referring to Myth and Will. It ends with an urban legend about a girl in a cheongsam that can solve problems, which is referring to Myth.
• But Thou Must!: Most of the time, you need to get an S-rank ending to continue the game; this can force the player to choose outcomes they otherwise wouldn't. Later on you get the ability to switch between options and can sometimes avert this, but there are still many places where you're forced to choose an outcome you may not want, either because no route exists for the other options or because it's required for something else. In particular:
  • You must allow the Wholesome Crossdresser who saved Alicia to die, even though there's an ending where he lives that doesn't cause any particular problems for anyone, simply because that route doesn't lead to her returning to work as an assassin, which invalidates the entire rest of the plot.
  • Similarly, while there's an ending in one case that implies that Li Wen might actually end up with Jimmy, it doesn't lead to any further letters and there are letters entangled with theirs that will be locked if you try to stay there, so all you can do after finding it is switch back to the main timeline.
  • Erasing Pi's backstory so he never becomes a serial killer is trivially easy; however, since his actions as Pi are so tightly entwined with most of rest of the story, doing so will cause half the timeline to become black and inaccessible - not to mention that he's needed as Pi for the Golden Ending.
• Calling Card: Pi leaves a smiley face on his victims. It's how he got his nickname, since the smile and the eyes were close enough to be mistaken for the Pi symbol (π) when viewed upside-down.
• Character Tics: Will has a habit of touching his face, particularly his horns, when he's fibbing. Will's aware of this, so also does this move when telling Myth a painful truth so she won't believe him. He even gave his dog form horns just so the tic would be more noticeable when he needed it to be.
• Cynicism Catalyst:
  • Due to Daddie's death, Spottie started to distrust humans and see them as tools for his own gain.
  • Kang Baek-Ya started off as a cop who wanted to fight for justice, but his unauthorized solo scouting mission in W602 caused Unit 2, including their leader, to be killed by the gangs (or so he convinced himself). This made him disillusioned and despaired, the way he is now in the story.
  • Will had been trying to change their fate for years while Myth is asleep, but a millennia without results caused him to be resentful of it.
• Dirty Cop: Kim, the head of Busan Police's Unit 3, who essentially helped the gangs regain power by betraying Unit 2.
• Doing In the Wizard: Myth is eventually informed that there exist man-made machines with the power to manipulate probability and change reality. She and Will are said machines, and not actually gods.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: The outcome of every event is ranked from S, for perfect, to X, for bad. However, some glossary terms, and even entire plot lines, are only seen with less-than-perfect outcomes. And certain later events actually require a non-S or X ending to be selected in past events for the later events' S ending to become available.
• Drag Queen: "Mama", the owner of the Maple Leaf bar that Alicia briefly works at.
• Dysfunction Junction: Due to the background of some of the senders, and how consistently the senders find themselves in messed-up situations that requires the gods to alter their fate again and again.
• Easy Amnesia: The game starts with Myth not remembering anything about her position due to a head injury after falling down some stairs, leading to a Justified Tutorial. Subverted when it turns out that Will's been purposely erasing Myth's memories.
• Endless Winter: The view outside of Myth and Will's house. It's what happened to Earth after people started wars over the power of WILL.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Myth eventually learns that humanity fought over the ability to control WILL when it was first revealed, the fallout of which ended all life and caused an Endless Winter.
• Exact Time to Failure: Towards the end of the game, a clock starts counting down in real time, showing how long until WILL completely runs out of energy.
• Eye Scream: Chang has his eyes gorged during the climax of his route. Though he avoids being completely blinded he still ends up with permanent vision impairment.
• Foreshadowing: All over the place thanks to the non-linear timeline of received letters.
  • The first "Dictionary" entry that Myth encounters, in the very first letter, is information on a popular mascot character named "Spottie". Later, a cat named after said mascot becomes a major character Myth has to help.
  • Rocky's sole letter highlights that Jimmy is a massive slob. Come 'The Final Battle', Jimmy's plan to catch Pi is ruined due to the fact the the laundry basket he was intending to hide in is too full with his dirty clothes for him to be able to do so.
  • Yang Ying laments about her doomed crush on Wen Zhaoren for a good portion of her only letter. In the S ending of said letter, she is vividly reminded of her younger self when looking at Li Wen. This foreshadows Li Wen's relationship with Wen Zhaoren ending in tragedy in certain timelines.
  • Carlos comes to the attention of the gang he's recruited into after one of their higher ups sees a picture of Alicia on his phone. Much later, it's revealed that he recognizes her due to her being a highly ranked assassin in the gang.
• Forgotten First Meeting: Chang's motivation to enact justice stems from a childhood incident where he was saved from a fire by an older kid, whose actual identity he doesn't remember. It was, coincidentally, his new boss Kang.
• For Want Of A Nail: Most of the destiny-altering changes are mundane actions, such as a light bulb bursting or a phone being dropped.
• Gaydar: Kang Baek-Ya claims (in an internal monologue) to be able to tell if a man is gay thanks to being around gay acquaintances. However several events in previous letters (being flustered around Chang in the bathhouse, the Bedmate Reveal with Pi) imply that this trope is actually in play.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Will laments that he and Myth don't get many prayers because their job is to prevent disasters worth praying about from happening in the first place. Subverted when it turns out neither Will nor Myth are gods at all; they are both A.I.s with time altering abilities.
• Grandfather Paradox: Despite knowing how people would fight over WILL, their creators had to reveal it to the public before saving their children. Otherwise, they'd have no reason to create said timeline-altering device, and the timeline would revert to its initial state.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Sometimes, it's impossible to get a certain rank on an event until you play through a different event that shows up later on. For example, you can't get an S rank on Chang Gyeong-Min's "Unit 4: Gone" event until you first get an S rank on Spottie's "Meow, Meow, Meow" event, so that Spottie won't be in the toilet and thus won't disrupt Chang's attempt to gather files.
  • Figuring out Lieutenant Jin's numerical password requires information not mentioned in any event. His cipher is doodled in the background of one of Chang's earlier letters, which can only be seen if you replay the letter's text instead of just reading it. And then the player needs to know what the day of the week it is, with Jin considering Monday the first day of the week and a few days passing before this particular event, to calculate what the password actually is.
  • The Golden Ending of the game relies on the game's biggest case of Necessary Fail to occur, and involves characters that seemingly have no connection to the greater scope of events. You need to follow Pi and Carlos's plots up to the point where you break a killer out of prison, then go back and kill Spottie's Daddie in the cat's first event. This leads to Pi causing a crash with an armored car carrying WILL while Spottie's nearby, Pi deciding to adopt the cat, and Pi taking WILL into hiding with him as a toy for Spottie while having no clue of its true power.
• He's Back!: Wen Zhaoren's best ending wherein he overcomes stomach cancer, gets together with Li Wen, and regains his artistic inspiration.
• Heroic Sacrifice: At the very end, Will gives up his remaining energy and erases Myth's memories of him so that she can live a happy life with humanity in the past.
• Hostile Show Takeover: When Myth starts remembering too much about her past, Will resets her memories and convinces her that he's her Master, taking her responsibility for rewriting fate in the process.
• Hot-Blooded: Chang Gyeong-Min, the rookie cop that fights for Justice!
• Hourglass Plot: If you include their backstories, this can happen twice between Kang (saved Chang as a kid, became disillusioned from the Unit 2 incident, gets his passion reignited by Chang joining the squad) and Chang (started as an ordinary kid, becomes passionate after the childhood incident, can potentially choose to retire early if his bond with Kang isn't close enough to be invited to his new task force).
• I Lied: Pi's final trap for Jimmy was not meant to be solved, as a victim eluding him would ruin his reputation.
• Improbable Weapon User: Chang Gyeong-Min's "tail", a blade on a white ribbon tied to his left hand.
• In Spite of a Nail: When re-editing people's fates, certain events still happen in other people's timelines, even if their paths were altered by swapping events from the edited person's pleas. The most notable example is Kang still ending up in a shootout with Unit 3 even if Chang was assigned to the Archives instead of Unit 4 (an event that now concludes with a still-alive Jin saving him, as the information he originally died for is now easily obtained from archivist Chang).
• Interface Spoiler: With the Steam trading cards, as they all depict people that write letters Will and Myth will receive. Notably, Park Sang-Gun isn't depicted, but Pi is, hinting at their connection.
• Irony: Pi spites the existence of gods due to his childhood, which has led to him being a unrepentant killer whose motivation is to save the world using terror. Despite this, he's one of the prayer senders whose timeline is changed by "gods", and he's eventually the one who finds the metal boxes that (unbeknownst to him) contains WILL, essentially saving the entire world by keeping them as mere trinkets, out of sight of people that would fight wars over them.
• I Will Find You: Carlos's story starts with him traveling to Hong Kong to find his long lost sister Alicia, and he continues doggedly searching for her for most of his letters. Though he comes very, very close to doing so, he ultimately fails to track her down.
• I Work Alone: Kang Baek-Ya, due to the fact that his murderous split personality cares very little for the distinction between 'friend' and 'foe' when he goes on the rampage.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After getting away with the murders of actually horrible people, Serial-Killer Killer Pi's apprehended after Jimmy, who is simply an innocent victim Mistaken for Pedophile, turns the tables on him.
• Latex Perfection: One of Kang Baek-Ya's subordinates is a master of it, first passing herself off as a muscly goon, and later as Kang.
• Mafia Princess: Ye is a shady individual that's gotten on the bad side of the gang Carlos joins. However, Carlos ends up feeling sympathy for her and helps her escape.
• Make an Example of Them: This is Pi's motivation for hunting down Jimmy, even though Jimmy's simply been Mistaken for Pedophile. Pi is aware of Jimmy's innocence, but considers the Example to be more important.
• Manipulative Bastard: Hotaru is skilled at seducing and manipulating people in jail to get what he wants, mostly favors and information. He's not even a criminal, having asked to be incarcerated to find out more about Alicia, the woman that murdered his lover.
• Medium Awareness: Myth wonders why, when she and Will talk, it comes out as beeps. Additionally, when Li Wen visits an art exhibit, one of the sub-par outcomes reveals that classmate Jimmy plays WILL: A Wonderful World.
• Missed Him by That Much: How Carlos' search for his sister ultimately ends, at least in-game.
• Mistaken for Gay: The Z outcome of the event where Chang and Kang are in a bathhouse together.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: When he grows up, Jimmy is slandered by a gossip magazine this way, which unfortunately grabs the attention of Pi. Played with when it's later revealed that Pi figured out the truth very quickly, but he still decided to go after Jimmy in order to frighten actual pedophiles.
• Mood Whiplash: One moment you're helping a Chinese student with her everyday life or a Korean justice-obsessed cop fight crimes, and the next moment you're helping a young Mexican woman escape slavery.
• Multiple Endings: Every event has at least two outcomes, but there's two endings for the game as a whole, dependent on whether or not the player succeeds before the Exact Time to Failure.
• Necessary Fail: Myth learns this the hard way, when her original attempts to S-Rank every single pray received leads to everyone involved being no better, or sometimes even worse, than before her intervention.
• One Degree of Separation: Every single letter-writing character ends up sharing a scene with at least one of the others during the story's events.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Pi, since he's repressed his memories of his childhood as Park Sang-Gun.
• Pædo Hunt: Pedophiles and child abusers make up the majority of Pi's victims; Pi starts to target Jimmy in response to a false rumor about him. While Jimmy initially intends to just convince Pi that he's innocent, in reality Pi knew Jimmy was innocent from the start and wanted to make an example of him anyway since his factual innocence or guilt would have no bearing on the chilling effect that killing him would have.
• Parting-Words Regret: If you get an S rank for Li Wen's event "The Cafe across the Street", you learn that in Li Wen's backstory, she used to live with her father, but they had a huge argument because he was drunk and Li Wen shouted, "I hate you, Father!" Unfortunately he died that same night, so those were the last words Li Wen ever said to him.
• Pretty Boy: Hotaru, an imprisoned male geisha. Also, Park Sang-Gun is a rather pretty child which unfortunately causes him to catch the eye on a depraved doctor once he's institutionalized.
• Professional Killer: Alicia, Carlos' sister, is forced to become one to avoid death.
• Rape as Backstory: This happens to Park Sang-Gun after he's committed to a mental institution.
• Refuge in Audacity: Will states that any event swapping can work as long as it still follows the structure of the event as a whole, in a sequence that requires swapping a fish with a gun (because, in their respective contexts, they're both being used as weapons).
• The Reveal: Myth and Will aren't gods, but machines called WILL created by married scientists, with personalities based on their two children and built to save those kids from a fatal car crash. They've also outlived humanity by hundreds of millions of years, and Will's been trying to avert The End of the World as We Know It instead of merely responding to the pleas of a select few individuals.
• Rewriting Reality: Myth and Will's power.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Jimmy has access to plenty of expensive technology, including a virtual reality headset and smart glasses, but tries to learn tennis by reading The Prince of Tennis.
• Running Gag: Li Wen thinking that, if she got cornered by who she believes was chasing her, the perp would cut her to pieces with a chainsaw courtesy of watching too many slasher movies.
• Serial-Killer Killer: Pi, though he goes after "sinners" in general.
• Shout-Out: One level has Jimmy playing a Bland-Name Product copy of The King of Fighters, with him using an Expy of Iori Yagami and his opponent playing an expy of Kyo Kusanagi. Not only that, but knowing Iori's movesets actually helps complete the level; rearranging his inputs will cause him to execute Iori's corresponding finishers from the game.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: It appears to be a very cynical story, with everything Myth does to S-Rank prayers and ensure happy endings seems to make things worse, which takes a toll on her. But then Will starts employing Necessary Fail, and while not every story ends completely idealistically (including Myth and Will's own fate), every single character does end up satisfied with their state of affairs.
• Sore Loser: Exaggerated with the kid that Jimmy beats in the fighting game tournament, who starts spreading rumors that Jimmy is a pedophile.
• Split Personality: Kang Baek-Ya has one, that comes out whenever he's been injured.
• Stalking is Love: Jimmy's first attempts to make contact with his crush Li Wen involve hacking into a credit machine to find both her email and real-life address.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Hotaru and his lover, due to the latter ending up as one of Alicia's many victims. This can also be the fate of Wen Zhaoren and Li Wen in certain endings.
• Starving Artist: Wen Zhaoren, who works as a school art teacher because grief has given him a decade-long drought of inspiration.
• Student/Teacher Romance: What the relationship between Wen Zhaoren and Li Wen progresses towards.
• Talking Animal: Will has a mostly dog-like appearance, save for two tiny horns. He chose this appearance, rather than that of the boy his personality was based on, to avoid Myth being burdened with the knowledge of their true selves until she's ready.
• Title Drop: WILL, in all capitals, is the name of the machines that can alter fate. And at the very end, Will hopes that Myth will get to live in a wonderful world.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: The Fury of the Cat reveals that this is the case for all of Park Sang-Gun's letters, since said character is suffering from a mental disorder brought about from his mother's unrelenting abuse.
• Two Aliases, One Character: While most characters that change over time just have their profiles edited, there's one that changes so significantly that they get an entirely new profile. It's Park Sang-Gun, who forgets his childhood and becomes Pi thanks to a mental hospital's torture.
• Unwinnable by Design: The final trap that Pi sets up for Jimmy is this; the victim has been poisoned, and has to identify which syringe (or combination of them) contains the antidote. But the only way for the victim to survive is to realize NONE of the syringes have the antidote, collapse, and then stab Pi with a syringe when he comes to mark Jimmy's body with his Calling Card, at which point Pi pulls out a real antidote to save himself.
• Verbal Tic: Most of Jimmy's recounts of events involve him ending sentences with emojis.
• Wham Line: In The Fury of the Cat, a (to Spottie) throwaway line reveals that Park Sang-Gun's letters were written Through the Eyes of Madness and that it was his mother, not his father, who was abusing him. While the doctor previously told him that this was the case, the player has no reason to believe him and every reason to doubt him; Spottie, on the other hand, is an uninvolved observer with absolutely no reason to lie.