What's the appeal of Visual Novels?

Specter Von Baren

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Sorry to Bother You is way better than a lot of anime that I've seen that were basically unanimous "masterpieces" by 90+% of user reviews. I've seen stuff that I'd literally rate as the one of the very worst things I've ever seen that were rated as being a masterpiece by vast vast majority of user reviews. That's only ever happened with regards to anime.
One man's ocean is another man's puddle. For instance, the anime I'd rate as being exceptional is Darker Than Black, but my reason for this is most likely because it speaks to me in a personal way in that Contractors and Dolls seem to be meant to represent autistic people. Contractors are people that have very specific special abilities but pay the price of a "contract" which can cause physical effects like aging in some but for most it manifests as some kind of compulsive action like ear marking the pages in a book, writing poetry, eating and then throwing up cigarettes, or breaking your own fingers... They also have very logic based ways of thinking and interacting with people that unnerve normal people. Then you have the Dolls which are people that can see through various mediums like water or glass and show no emotion at all.

Very specialized abilities, OCD, distant, logic based thinking, inexpressive faces, and the tendency to see things others don't. I like the show just for everything else it does but I consider it "deep" because it speaks to me personally as an Aspie. On the other hand, I can easily imagine someone watching it and seeing it as a show with a super power system that's needlessly complex or just there to make everything slightly more special in order to distinguish itself.

Also I highly doubt this has only happened to you when it comes to anime given how much trash comes for all the other mediums, anime just sticks out to you because you don't watch it so the bad experiences stand out more.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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Also I highly doubt this has only happened to you when it comes to anime given how much trash comes for all the other mediums, anime just sticks out to you because you don't watch it so the bad experiences stand out more.
I'm not saying other mediums don't have trash, I'm saying that trash is never raised up as some masterpiece by the vast vast majority of the community in other mediums.
 
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Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
I'm not saying other mediums don't have trash, I'm saying that trash is never raised up as some masterpiece by the vast vast majority of the community in other mediums.
That's just not true. You regularly see a huge disconnect between reviewers and audience. Look at the film 'white chicks' 15% on rotten tomatoes but a 55% audience score.
 

Phoenixmgs

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That's just not true. You regularly see a huge disconnect between reviewers and audience. Look at the film 'white chicks' 15% on rotten tomatoes but a 55% audience score.
And, where am I going to find 90+% people saying White Chicks is a masterpiece that can't be missed with an average user score of 8+/10? People enjoying White Chicks or Sharknado for what they are doesn't equal them thinking it's a deep thought provoking masterpiece. I'm not going to find White Chicks on any 'best of' movie lists besides maybe a Wayans Brothers best list.
 
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fOx

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That's just not true. You regularly see a huge disconnect between reviewers and audience. Look at the film 'white chicks' 15% on rotten tomatoes but a 55% audience score.
I don't see anyone arguing that White Chick's is art. The people in this thread are trying to argue that visual novels are art.
 

BrawlMan

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Look at the film 'white chicks' 15% on rotten tomatoes but a 55% audience score.
Not to butt in, but White Chicks fucking sucked! 95 minutes of my life I will never get back. What's worse, I did not get the choice to see it, My family wanted to see it, and being in that theater was cringe fest. The movie came a month before my birthday when I was 14. One of the worst films released in summer.
 

Worgen

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I don't see anyone arguing that White Chick's is art. The people in this thread are trying to argue that visual novels are art.
And they can be. Art is something that moves you, what is art for someone may not be for others. If you argue otherwise then you are just wrong.

Not to butt in, but White Chicks fucking sucked! 95 minutes of my life I will never get back. What's worse, I did not get the choice to see it, My family wanted to see it, and being in that theater was cringe fest. The movie came a month before my birthday when I was 14. One of the worst films released in summer.
I never saw it, but I remember the ads for it. Ugh, if the full thing was even half as bad as those ads then you have my eternal sympathy, cause holy shit. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to watch that movie let alone enjoying it.
 

09philj

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VNs exist because they are a cheap and easy way to smash together long form novels, CYOA, illustrations, and sound design. They are also a fairly natural way to use first person present tense narration, which can often feel out of place in a novel. VNs don't need as high a density of artwork as comics, but unlike a light novel can add illustrations to every scene, even if it's just reused images of the characters. They're also straightforward to distribute, particularly since downloading stuff from the internet is now easier than it's ever been. Every artistic medium has to compromise on some things, it's just a question of what the creator values and can achieve with the resources they have available.
 

fOx

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And they can be. Art is something that moves you, what is art for someone may not be for others. If you argue otherwise then you are just wrong.


I never saw it, but I remember the ads for it. Ugh, if the full thing was even half as bad as those ads then you have my eternal sympathy, cause holy shit. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to watch that movie let alone enjoying it.
Incorrect. Art is something that moves society forward, to an egalitarian state of being. The communist manifest is art. The bible is art. Anime, jrpg's, and visual novels are not art. In fact, they've caused society to regress, leading me to believe they are in fact "anti-art", a term I just invented.
 
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SupahEwok

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Incorrect. Art is something that moves society forward, to an egalitarian state of being. The communist manifest is art. The bible is art. Anime, jrpg's, and visual novels are not art. In fact, they've caused society to regress, leading me to believe they are in fact "anti-art", a term I just invented.
Weebs are degenerate creatures.
To quote another learned man:
You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I am sorry to have to go into all these details but I must. The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not. They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess.

C. S. Lewis
As anyone who has witnessed the downward spiral of beloved friendships into animated degeneracy could tell you, indulging in weebery begets even worse weebery. It begins with the "cool" or "cute" underaged animated girl, then moves to girls or women with improbable or even impossible bodily proportions, nearly always including belief defying, body clinging fabric (which are almost always ill-drawn anyhow, yet the instinctual crying defense for the "waifu" is already present when confronted with any such critique). Next comes the "tame" hentai, the anthropomorphized women of all sizes, shapes, and bestialities, the "genderbend". By these means, every person, object, animal, or piece of imagination in the world is reconstructed into an object of sexual gratification. By this point there is no recovery. The weeb has abused his sexual desire into a curse, in the vein of Erysichthon of myth:

Erysichthon once ordered all trees in the sacred grove of Demeter to be cut down. One huge oak was covered with votive wreaths, a symbol of every prayer Demeter had granted, and so the men refused to cut it down. Erysichthon grabbed an axe and cut it down himself, killing a dryad nymph in the process. The nymph's dying words were a curse on Erysichthon.

Demeter responded to the nymph's curse and punished him by entreating Limos, the spirit of unrelenting and insatiable hunger, to place herself in his stomach. Food acted like fuel on a fire: The more he ate, the hungrier he got. Erysichthon sold all his possessions to buy food, but was still hungry. At last he sold his own daughter Mestra into slavery. Mestra was freed from slavery by her former lover Poseidon, who gave her the gift of shape-shifting into any creature at will to escape her bonds. Erysichthon used her shape-shifting ability to sell her numerous times to make money to feed himself, but no amount of food was enough. Eventually, Erysichthon ate himself in hunger. Nothing of him remained the following morning.
As Erysichthon's hunger only grew from his attempts at sating it, so too does the weeb's lust for "lewds" grow with its lack of fulfillment. It is common among the disinterested and lowly educated to assume the ancients were foolish believers of sky people that controlled the elements. Not so. All myths contain lessons and warnings for the ordering of society, for human nature has never changed, and with the weight of recorded millennia at our back, it is a safe conjecture that it never will change; therefore, their wisdom is our wisdom, if we but have the grace to listen.

Friends, countrymen, I spend much of my time in these forums in jests, capers, "trolls". Yet now I implore you, sincerely, if you have love for kith and kin, look for the signs. Save them from the path of weebery before it is too late. Do not assume a spate of fascination with Eastern animation is a passing fancy. Do not listen to entreaties that so-called Visual Novels "have merit as art". Indeed, art is that which makes us feel, yet our feelings betray us. They are chemicals, endorphins, hormones, supplementing our rationality with unthinking instinct, and while a useful tool, as all tools, they can be warped and misused, to our intellectual ruin. Do not allow your loved ones to become slaves to unfulfilled desire. That is the way of marriage to body pillows.

Be vigilant. One blink is enough for one's course to be unsalvageably waylaid. Embrace the Prophet Muhammed, Peace Be Upon Him, and move to Universal Oneness in spiritual fulfillment in the love of God and his sons, Buddha and Gerald "Slink" Johnson. Thank you.

This post was written in memoriam to CrimsonPheonix, RundownRabbit, and Lost Gryphon aka "Tsun Tzu". May they be graced with the light and peace they did not find in life, in remembrance of halcyon days of innocence.

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

William Wordsworth
 
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Dreiko

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Incorrect. Art is something that moves society forward, to an egalitarian state of being. The communist manifest is art. The bible is art. Anime, jrpg's, and visual novels are not art. In fact, they've caused society to regress, leading me to believe they are in fact "anti-art", a term I just invented.
See, that's the sort of thing that is purely subjective and is based on which values you deem progressive and which ones regressive so that's no actual standard, that's just an opinion. It's just not saying "art is what I think is art" but rather "what I think is progressive, is art", it still relies solely on the speaker's opinion on whether they feel this thing is progressive or not.

Some people who see society differently than you do will see things like the the communist manifesto as having done way more harm than anime ever has for example. I for one am not aware of the tens of millions of people who starved or cannibalized eachother in anime gulags lol.


This is nothing new btw, back in the time of Shakespeare there were elitists condemning his work as trash too. Any new popular thing that is somewhat different from an established norm will have reactionaries rejecting it for not meeting whatever arbitrary criteria they only just came up with to explain away their intuitive dislike of change. If anything, that is the most regressive of all.

I think progressive outlooks allow for the inclusion of everyone's form of input and expression and your job is to find the good within it all and use it to improve society. Not reject whole bodies of work because of a couple of debatable subjective blemishes.
 
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fOx

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See, that's the sort of thing that is purely subjective and is based on which values you deem progressive and which ones regressive so that's no actual standard, that's just an opinion. It's just not saying "art is what I think is art" but rather "what I think is progressive, is art", it still relies solely on the speaker's opinion on whether they feel this thing is progressive or not.

Some people who see society differently than you do will see things like the the communist manifesto as having done way more harm than anime ever has for example. I for one am not aware of the tens of millions of people who starved or cannibalized eachother in anime gulags lol.


This is nothing new btw, back in the time of Shakespeare there were elitists condemning his work as trash too. Any new popular thing that is somewhat different from an established norm will have reactionaries rejecting it for not meeting whatever arbitrary criteria they only just came up with to explain away their intuitive dislike of change. If anything, that is the most regressive of all.

I think progressive outlooks allow for the inclusion of everyone's form of input and expression and your job is to find the good within it all and use it to improve society. Not reject whole bodies of work because of a couple of debatable subjective blemishes.
Not at all. The existance of god is a fact, whether others acknowledge it or not. So, to, is the perfection of communism, as it is the estsblished and holy government desired by the lord. Christian communism is the logical perfect end state of humanity. Anything that does not further that cause is unimportant. Anything that hinders it is evil.

That is why i am willing to accept kon, takahata, and miyazaki. They have all looked favorably upon communism during their careers. But visual novels are iredeemable.
 
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Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
Incorrect. Art is something that moves society forward, to an egalitarian state of being. The communist manifest is art. The bible is art. Anime, jrpg's, and visual novels are not art. In fact, they've caused society to regress, leading me to believe they are in fact "anti-art", a term I just invented.
You have very weird nonsensical definitions for words that no one else uses.
 

Houseman

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I recommend Danganronpa, Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0, the Zero Escape series.

Anyone have any more "Mystery" type VN's where the focus is on the plot?
 
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Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
I recommend Danganronpa, Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0, the Zero Escape series.

Anyone have any more "Mystery" type VN's where the focus is on the plot?
I haven't tried these, but I have a friend who loves VNs and she recommends these for mystery games that you didn't list.