Beach Episode

Every good anime needs a Beach Episode. And not just anime, any kind of long form narrative can use a break. Often it's just a way to save some cash and hook the audience with some gratuitous fan service and there's nothing wrong with either of those things. But a great story uses the chance to give the narrative pacing and budget a break as a way to give the characters a break as well. It takes that time off and asks what makes the characters tick when they aren't bogged down in the week to week process of whatever magical/robotic/romantic shenanigans they're getting up to every week.

That's why I love the holodeck episodes of Star Trek. I understand why people can think it's silly in the middle of the galaxy-wide stakes of the show's lore for our characters to run off and cosplay as Sherlock Holmes or 1920s gangsters but it feels so vital to remember that these are people whose lives are larger than just an endless series of conflicts and discoveries. That they take time out of their day to play the trombone or perform Shakespeare or dress up as Robin Hood.

I'm especially fond of the Deep Space Nine episodes because of how explicit they make all of this, that without the ability to step away from the conflict and unpack and understand what they just went through by hanging out with a store brand version of the Rat Pack in a 1950s casino they literally couldn't keep on fighting.

So Beach episode is a game about that. It's a solo journaling game about what it means to take a break from something you've decided is your whole world. Your conflict might not be as grand as a galactic war and the consequences may not be life and death but you're going to be playing at the edges of a conflict that really matters both to your character and to the world they'll inhabit. And you're going to try and help them find room to step outside of that conflict and find at least a little bit of a life for themselves that isn't defined by the story of the IMPORTANT thing they're doing.