Visual Novels; their place in the gaming world?

[[Kira Must Die]]

I've played Saya no Uta, Katawa Shoujo, and a bit of Clannad. I haven't played much visual novels, mostly because I can't really find the time and most of the really good ones are 50 hours long. I've enjoyed the ones I've played. I love Saya no Uta, and I like Katawa Shoujo. The Clannad VN bored me, though, so I'll just stick with the anime, but it has less to do with it being bad and more that I don't have the time to invest in a VN that long and slow.

Whether or not visual novels are games is certainly debatable. This is simply another case of "My definition of *blank* is different from your definition of *blank*." It's like "Are Video Games art?" or "Are Anime cartoons?" Everyone is gonna have a different answer. With that said, though, going in with the same expectations you would other types of games is certainly wrong.

For me, they're skin to old interactive adventure / puzzle games, or a choose-your-own adventure type of game. While ultimately for most of these games you're simply picking out of a handful of branching choices, you need a clear end goal to pick the ones you want. Whether you want to get a certain ending or to romance a certain character, your aiming to achieve a specific goal, and you achieve that by picking the right choices. That, to me anyway, makes them "games."

 

[Timeless Lavender]

I think visual novels are also videogames,especially when games are starting to combine different genres together. For example, Ace Attorney series were classified as both adventure and visual novel. At the end of the day it is the same abstract train of thought where we all give our own interpretation of the definition of a game. But to me it is a game since majority of the visual novels are dating sims where your objective of the game is to date a character you wanted to which have a failure state despite having barely to any gameplay.

 

[springheeljack]

pssst if people are interested in Visual Novels there is totally a group you can join
Just sayin'

 

[BreakfastMan]

Eh, there are some VNs I would consider pretty good, though from what I have seen they are sadly not the norm. Games like Hotel Dusk or the 999 series, for example, make good use of the genre (though it helps that those games are decently well written). Too bad most of the ones that clog up steam and the like are dreck like Sakura Spirit or Katawa Shoujo. Ugh.

Also, if VNs count as games, so does Depression Quest, a game most people on here seem to despise with a firey passion. Just saying, guys.

 

[ZiggyE]

As someone who has read a lot of visual novels, I'd say they're not games at all, but an independent medium of their own.

 

[GabeZhul]

I think visual novels are also videogames,especially when games are starting to combine different genres together. For example, Ace Attorney series were classified as both adventure and visual novel. At the end of the day it is the same abstract train of thought where we all give our own interpretation of the definition of a game. But to me it is a game since majority of the visual novels are dating sims where your objective of the game is to date a character you wanted to which have a failure state despite having barely to any gameplay.

The Ace Attorney series is something we tried getting rid of over at VNDB for years now, but we can't because the official PR people (erroneously, partly due to a translation error) declared it so and if we removed them a thousand fans and well-meaning newbies would clamor to re-add it to the DB. Those are adventure games with the visual trappings of VNs, but they are only hybrids at best and they are still causing us frustration to this day by providing a bad example that people can refer to when they try to add even less VN-esque games.

As for your dating sim comment, sorry but you are just wrong in your terminology. Dating sims are a relatively scarce type of raising game (think of the Princess Maker series, except you are raising the protagonist instead of another character). It's a genre based on raising statistics and triggering events (usually related to love-interests) using said statistics. The term was for a long time synonymous with VNs as a whole, erroneously, because dating sims came first to the US market and so any actual VNs coming afterwards that happened to focus on romance and individual heroine routes (read: about 80% of all VNs) got automatically labeled "dating sims" as well whether they had any sim elements or not. As I said, that is simply not true. Most dating sims are not visual novels and the dating sim/visual novel hybrids (aka.: dating sims with extensive storylines and a consistent narration) are vanishingly rare to the point where we only list a handful of them over at VNDB.

Also, there is a bit of food for thought: Visual Novels didn't "evolve" form choose your own adventure books or dating sims. Their predecessors were text-heavy point-and-click adventure games, with map movement, puzzles and all the other trappings of the genre. With time, developers realized that their audience wasn't there for the gameplay but for the story they told, so the gameplay elements slowly got phased out, first by taking out the point-and-click aspect (which, to be fair, was usually only used to pad things out anyway), then the map-movement and then the rest of the interface until you got the modern VN medium which is closer to novels than games.

As for the quality of VNs, most of them are crap. The majority of VNs are like what harlequin romance books are to literature: they are simple, shallow, but entertaining if you are in the mood and fairly harmless. However, on the same token, saying that the entire medium is crap because of that is literally the same as declaring that all books are crap because of harlequin romance. It brings a certain idiom about babies and bathwater into mind, if you know what I mean...

 

[Elfgore]

This is a tough one. For every VN that I have played, there is zero gameplay. All you do is click... but all you do in a point-n-click game is click as well. Yes PnC games have puzzles, but you could argue getting a certain route in a VN is a puzzle all its own. I don't take an issue with calling them games, but they should completely have their own genre.

 

[ZiggyE]

As for your dating sim comment, sorry but you are just wrong in your terminology. Dating sims are a relatively scarce type of raising game (think of the Princess Maker series, except you are raising the protagonist instead of another character). It's a genre based on raising statistics and triggering events (usually related to love-interests) using said statistics. The term was for a long time synonymous with VNs as a whole, erroneously, because dating sims came first to the US market and so any actual VNs coming afterwards that happened to focus on romance and individual heroine routes (read: about 80% of all VNs) got automatically labeled "dating sims" as well whether they had any sim elements or not. As I said, that is simply not true. Most dating sims are not visual novels and the dating sim/visual novel hybrids (aka.: dating sims with extensive storylines and a consistent narration) are vanishingly rare to the point where we only list a handful of them over at VNDB.

This pic pretty much sums it up.

Spoiler

 

[Casual Shinji]

Anything can be good, and I've never been a fan of the claim 'That's not a "game", so it sucks', but I've never played a visual novel before and probably never will. What I've seen of it never evoked any sort of interest in me. It just looks like anime with flat camera angles... and not in motion.

As for it's place in gaming... The subgenre known as 'Visual Novel', I guess.

 

[GabeZhul]

For the question whether VNs are a medium of their own or a genre of games, I have to say: both. It's all terminology.
To examine how that works, let's look at another thing that can be both a medium and a genre: RPGs.

An pure RPG has a number of very specific trappings.
-Focuses on a character/set of characters and their acts and deeds
-Character advancement (levels, ability points, skill training, etc.)
-Provides a narrative, with goals and rewards (quests)
-Gives the audience agency when forming the narrative (choices)
-Loot and other rewards

The thing that established all these attributes and thus can be viewed as the "pure RPG" would be the tabletop RPG and they are usually treated as their own medium (though some would argue they belong under the umbrella of "tabletop gaming", but that is pretty nebulous.)

However, you can take some of these elements out of the context of a pure RPG and you can put them into other interactive media (read: vidya games). The two aspects most often taken out are the advancement systems ("RPG elements") and the player agency (cue "Your choices shape the story and the game-world!" PR babble). Just because these elements can give any other game the trappings of RPGs doesn't make pure tabletop RPGs any less valid as their own medium.

In contrast, a pure Visual Novel has a number of very specific trappings.
-Has an audiovisual aspect (in contrast to books or pure text-based adventure games)
-Has no traditional gameplay elements
-Tells a story using the ADV (text-box at the bottom, 2D full-body sprites (tachies) at the front) or NVL (the transparent text-box covers the entire screen, the graphics are behind it) format
-Uses text exclusively to tell its story (the graphics and BGM are only there for illustration and setting the mood)
-Uses consistent narration

Thus a pure Visual Novel would be something like Fate/Stay Night, a title with audiovisuals, no gameplay, NVL presentation, text based storytelling and consistent narration.

However, you can take some of these element out of the context of a pure VN and you can put them into different interactive media. The one that is the most common is the ADV presentation, which is a very straightforward and cost-effective format when it comes to display dialog, and thus a lot of JRPGs use it (eg: the Persona series).
However, most of the time these are only considered VN elements of convenience, and it is much more common for things to go the other way when gameplay elements from video games get injected into VNs (usually JRPG battles and leveling and turn based combat/strategy). However, the final deciding factors that decides whether it's a game with VN trappings or a VN with gameplay elements is always the presence of consistent narration and the VN/gameplay ratio.

In the end though, just because there are hybrid games with VN elements in them doesn't mean that the pure VNs are any less valid as their own medium.

And with that I rest my case for why VNs can be considered both a separate medium and a video game genere depending on the "purity" of the defining elements present.

 

[FC Groningen]

As a guy that prefers games to have a strong story line, I played a few and there were only a few I liked. I tried Clannad too, but couldn't get into it for several reasons. Mostly because I consider most characters in Visual Novels to be (stereo)typical Japanese characters or just "Japanese". Most protagonists either start off as weak inept mamma boys or "bad boys that are too cool to care" and then continue the usual route in which you always end up with either 1 of the available "x" girls that are all into for some reason. In fact, I've completely had it with the 2 dimensional characters in either Anime or Western games.

The idea of visual novels appeals to me, but I'm still waiting for (more) decent story driven games from Western developers.

 

[Maximum Bert]

She could be a horse, or a tree for all I care. My point isn't her being a little girl, it's that the sex scenes feel so forced, they could as well not be in there at all. If they had a genuinely good reason and buildup for it other than "it's a 18+ game so it has to have sex in it hurr durr" I'd be more than fine with that.

Are you on about the sex scenes? or the pictures? cos the scenes definitely have a purpose because...

The sex scenes... are a problem, I admit. It's not that they are there. I read erotic fiction from time to time, so there's no problem with that. It's that they are usually horribly written, even when the rest of the VN is amazing. Well that, and that in many VNs, the sex scenes are just a remnant from the format's roots in Japanese dating sims: they are just there as a "reward" for the player. Incidentally, Saya no Uta isn't one of those. However much one may or not like them, the sex in that VN definitely has narrative importance.

It's not surprising, considering Saya no Uta's plot revolves almost exclusively around sex. Still, those scenes could've been written much more convincingly.

Yeah you pointed it out yourself sex is a key component of the plot along with mental perception. You dont have to like the VN (refuse to call it a game) but it definitely does not just toss sex scenes in for the hell of it I suppose some people found it erotic (some people are messed up) but really its mostly disturbing just like the entire book. I personally loved it, I like a lot of Lovecrafts work and that reminded me of it but it definitely had its own spin on it. I suppose they could have been written better considering perfection should be strived for but I personally thought they were very well written and integrated without being overly abundant. You dont have to like the VN but there is a difference between `not for me` and `bad`.

As for their place in the gaming world well I dont consider visual novels (proper viaual novels) games. In all I dont play many of them simply because there are so many and theres apparently a load of trash that I just cant be bothered to sort through. However all they are in essence is books with music and pictures all powerful mediums and they can certainly be used (and have been used) to create amazing experiences.

I used to be totally dismissive of them basically thought they were porn books and while some certainly are I consider myself corrected.

 

[Someone Depressing]

I took a look into visual novels a while back and I mostly found smut and creepy shit.

Of course, there are the greats. Katawa whatever, Ace Attorney, Umineko, and other stuff mentioned on this list. Most I have played, however, are utter horseshit. The "horseshit" part has been literal in some places. Ew.

Poe's Law is hard in effect here. As always, I believe that nothing is inherently art, though art can be created in anything. And if you consider [redacted for your pleasure+sanity] art, then fine. Go ahead and pay tons of money for your moe moe eroge crap and be done with it.

The VSDB (Visual Novel Database) is a pretty good resource for finding the best and finding the worst, the major partition being which one has about three hours of garbage, boobs bigger than heads, and full-on hardcore loli guro that someone, somewhere, somehow, is getting off to this very second. Then you can lose a little bit of faith in the world and move onto your next pile of bilge.

 

[SquallTheBlade]

The VSDB (Visual Novel Database) is a pretty good resource for finding the best and finding the worst, the major partition being which one has about three hours of garbage, boobs bigger than heads, and full-on hardcore loli guro that someone, somewhere, somehow, is getting off to this very second. Then you can lose a little bit of faith in the world and move onto your next pile of bilge.

So you lose faith in the world just because people enjoy things you don't? What a great way to look at the world. I would rather be happy that people can find enjoyment in something that I can't.

 

[DOOM GUY]

I like VNs, there are some pretty damn good ones, I can't say I exactly consider them to be games though (though there are some exceptions), they're something of their own.

 

[Mutant1988]

What is a game? An activity with a goal.
What is a book? Text that you read, often times a story, with a beginning and end.
What is the goal of books? To read them.

Ergo, a book with activity (Like choices) is a game. Maybe not a great one, but it's technically a game (To varying degrees). I wouldn't go as far as to say that reading constitutes gameplay though, being a fairly passive experience.

So yes, I do think visual novels are games and should be called games. That is, as long as they involve something more than just reading, be it simple choices to make throughout the game or elements of entirely difference genres such as adventure, puzzle, dating sim etc.

I have played some fantastic visual novels such as Corpse Party and Katawa Shoujo. They might not have a lot of gameplay but they make up for it a thousandfold with well written story and characters. Both fantastic games that I recommend checking out. I've also heard that Dangan Ronpa is excellent. It looks interesting, but I don't think I have a system that can play them.

I've also watched a long play of the game Saya No Uta and it's one of the most disturbing and sad horror stories I've ever read or seen. I highly recommend looking for it on Youtube. The videos I watched omitted or censored everything explicit.

If it's an entirely choice-less visual novel though I'd sooner call it a digital graphic novel (Regardless of whether it has audio as well) since that is the term for actual physical books that tell the story through both text and images. Maybe perhaps affix audio before novel (Digital graphic audio novel). I do believe they are already distinguished by the term "Kinetic Novel" by the Japanese.

It's easy to get bogged down in semantics, more so when the terms go across language barriers.

 

[reverse_rpm]

Hmmm...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bvX4hzqcqc

It can be stretched to apply towards VNs.
Exaclty as stated above, a "Digital graphic audio novel" should not be sold on Steam.

 

[Mutant1988]

Hmmm...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bvX4hzqcqc

It can be stretched to apply towards VNs.
Exaclty as stated above, a "Digital graphic audio novel" should not be sold on Steam.

What's sold on Steam is entirely the discretion of Valve.

Keep in mind that the Steam store already sell a whole lot more than just video games:

http://store.steampowered.com/search/?snr=1_5_9__12&term=Software#sort_by=_ASC&category1=994&page=1

 

[small]

ive played one and its a genre that doesnt appeal personally. as to where it fits, its still a game as far as im concerned

 

[NPC009]

I wouldn't call all visual novels games (really depends on the number of choices and the results of said choices), but I think their existence as a medium between mediums is important. Games can only become better at story-telling if developers explore different genres and mediums.

As for if visual novels should be on Steam: that's for Valve to decide, isn't it? Personally, I rather like it. I like visual novels and being able to buy atleast a few of them by the same means as a good chunk of the games I play is convenient. Besides, it's not like it's bothering customers who aren't interested. Steams search engine and filters are decent enough, add in the customisable front page... Yeah, you don't even have to look at them if you don't want to.