Thank you! 
I agree, the five character one would be incredibly hard, but I do like challenges (saying that, I have just done a mystery where I used constant overlays to produce ghosts and that was tedious) 
. Basically, at the beginning of the first episode you would choose one character out of five to follow for the whole entire episode story which allows for more character development. Occasionally, during their story, you will cross the characters that you could have chosen until the end when they all join together which is where choices and branching would get complicated. In each episode for each character I am anticipating on having a major choice that will affect the timelines of the other characters whilst the others are smaller. The only way I have figured to work this into the whole ‘replayable’ feature of this kind of story (you can replay a story five times hence why there are five characters) is if I do a small quiz at the beginning asking if you have played the story before and what they chose for the major choices so they have the right gains for the story (which is why I would only do one major choice so that the quiz isn’t too long). I also understand that this means my code for each episode will end up from being 6000 lines in episode 1 to about 20000 lines, but hopefully the effort will be worth it… maybe 
. I don’t know if this makes much sense, but I hope this explains the branching a bit more. I just wanted a story on episode that, if you played it again, it would be completely different.