Birushana: How To Follow The Flowchart

thegamer.com:

It's not that Birushana: Rising Flower of Genpei is a needlessly convoluted visual novel. It tells its sweeping tale, with five major resolutions (each with a healthy dose of beheadings and the like), in an easy-to-grasp fashion all-the-while tasking its players with making colossal decisions for lovable heroine Shanao. It also touts numerous systems familiar to most visual novel enthusiasts, and especially fans of the otome subgenre.

Related:Birushana: How To Avoid Bad Endings

But one of those, the flowchart, can be intimidating at first. Not because it's some kind of sprawling web of crisscrossing links (it isn't), but because, even with its clean columns and clear divergences, it doesn't tell you much. Less information is provided, at least at first, than tends to be customary among VNs.

To begin with, note the vague subtitling behind nearly every point in the flowchart. (Each point corresponds with an individual scene; scenes that lead to each other are listed top-to-bottom to denote their relationship.) "2-1-13" and "2-1-14" are better understood once you get the hang of how to read their names. "2" is the chapter. "1" is a branching route within the chapter. "13" signifies the 13th scene along this chapter's path.

The above screenshot is quite early into the game, but let's compare it with something even earlier:

We've zoomed out now, which you can do with the proper button prompt, and you can see how the beginning of Birushana is a straight line segment of one scene followed by the next and so on. Chapter 2-5 is the first divergence point in the game. See how "2" is still the chapter, and "5" is still the scene number, but the middle number is missing?

That's because no branching has occurred yet. "2-1-5," on the