Visual Novels; their place in the gaming world?

Mutant1988

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NPC009 said:
If the developer can come up with something like that, great! But if the twist is just there as a stupid gimmick, I'd prefer they didn't bother.
Navigating the school in Corpse Party felt a bit like this. Like they put in a extremely simplistic exploration and puzzle game to make it more of a "game". I felt it detracted more than it added, especially during a certain part where
you have to exploit the fact that movement followed a grid system to bait a ghost to go to a specific grid square so that you could go around it's square and past it.

That sequence in particular just took me out of the experience completely. The fact that death scenes are unskippable (And that one was rather long) certainly didn't help. But overall, it's mostly just that the "game" part wasn't quite able to live up to the incredibly well written and acted story and I would assume it's because they just didn't have the budget to make it any other way or felt that it served a stylistic purpose (Which it does to a certain degree).

That said, there were also instances in the game where the "game" part of it was very well used.

Corpse Party is terrifying and incredibly disturbing. It might not look it, but it is.
 

NPC009

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I liked the exploring in Corpse Party. It worked well, because they bothered to add these disturbing details you won't be able to see if they'd used regular background still. The ghost part(s), though? Yeah, that was bullshit. The potentially long game over or bad end (I'd have to do it all over again!) scared me more than the actual ghost.
 

maninahat

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SquallTheBlade said:
maninahat said:
If it is the novel part that is the primary part (in spite of the name "visual novel"), then it is still a bad format. The word part of a visual novel is often reduced to one/two sentence captions that appear on the screen one at a time.
Wrong again.


You can set an automated scroller to move from one line to the next, but if you have a fast enough reading speed, the autoscrollers are too slow and you have to move to the next line with a mouse click or space bar. That is a terrible way to have to read a novel.
Just as terrible as flipping a page in a book. Why is that okay but not pressing enter/space/mouse?
No, a novel usually has more than 25 words to a page, so you don't have to turn a page every 1.5 seconds. If most books had only a sentence per page, and you had to turn a book page every 1.5 seconds, that would be similarly annoying.

Also, the two game screens you provided don't disprove my point. The exceptions to a trend do not disprove the existence of that trend, and I had already acknowledged repeatedly that there are exceptions. This is what qualifiers like "often" or "most" are for.
 

maninahat

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NPC009 said:
maninahat said:
You do know that many VNs are made with shoestring budgets by teams as small as one person? It's kinda like complaining indie developers never bother to innovate because so many of them make sidescrolling games. Doesn't mean that part of the industry is rotten. It's just that many have to pick their battles.
Indie developers are quite well known on their innovation in spite of their financial and technical limitations. That is often their biggest selling point. I know that for micro VN studios, it takes a hell of a lot of effort on their part to get something finished, but to be perfectly ruthless about it, if all they can manage is something staid and generic, then maybe they should adjust their ambition accordingly? Perhaps they should make shorter but more visually diverse games? Perhaps they could switch to a simpler art style that frees them up to devote more time to more story paths?

Besides, does deviating from the standard make all that much sense when it doesn't add anything to the game?
If the standard format is shitty and inefficient then yes, I'd welcome any attempt to deviate from it. Any deviation would almost certainly add something to a game format that has little currently going for it.
 

Mutant1988

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Have you played these games? Do you know what the intended audience is for each individual game?

Is it at all possible that what little you know is not everything there is to know?

Because it seems to me that you obsess over only those works that are marketed towards a hormone addled teenage audience. I mean, wow, that's a market!?

Of course there's games that pander to a specific audience. Same way as all other video games, movies, books, comics, manga etc.

You have gotten a lot of good recommendations of VNs that deviate from what you call the "norm". I suggest you go find a way to play them and get an educated opinion.

Let me cite Sturgeons Law - 90% of everything is crap.

But you know what his point was with that? That you should not use the 90% that is crap to dismiss the 10% that isn't.
 

SquallTheBlade

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maninahat said:
No, a novel usually has more than 25 words to a page, so you don't have to turn a page every 1.5 seconds. If most books had only a sentence per page, and you had to turn a book page every 1.5 seconds, that would be similarly annoying.
I don't know about you but pressing a button slightly more often isn't as annoying as flipping a page. But that's more of a personal opinion. There is nothing wrong with either one. They are just different methods of achieving the same thing and essentially meaningless. You wouldn't give higher value to something that has more words per page now would you?

Also, the two game screens you provided don't disprove my point. The exceptions to a trend do not disprove the existence of that trend, and I had already acknowledged repeatedly that there are exceptions. This is what qualifiers like "often" or "most" are for.
I can do this all day

 

Lono Shrugged

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It's a totally different genre in my opinion. It's closer to reading a kindle or comic book app than a game.

Also, they are terrible. So terrible...
 

NPC009

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maninahat said:
Besides, does deviating from the standard make all that much sense when it doesn't add anything to the game?
If the standard format is shitty and inefficient then yes, I'd welcome any attempt to deviate from it. Any deviation would almost certainly add something to a game format that has little currently going for it.
But why do they need to be more like games?

I look at it this way: it's not wrong for visual novels to not be a game. Some people like 'em that way, others don't. It's not as if one medium is inherently superior to the other, they just have different strengths. And it totally okay to like some mediums a bit more than others. Some people like reading, some don't. Some love movies, others like games better.

Now, if you'd like the play from hybrids (like, part VN, part adventure game), I'm sure we could recommend you some titles. Nearly all hybrids that were published in English were well recieved by both press and players alike. Except for Lux-Pain, thanks to a painfully awkward translation. But stay away from that and you're probably good :)
 

Kaimax

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Honestly, I want to question the ones saying it's Terrible/Bad/Trash/etc some questions.
How many have you played? What did you play?
 

maninahat

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NPC009 said:
maninahat said:
Besides, does deviating from the standard make all that much sense when it doesn't add anything to the game?
If the standard format is shitty and inefficient then yes, I'd welcome any attempt to deviate from it. Any deviation would almost certainly add something to a game format that has little currently going for it.
But why do they need to be more like games?

I look at it this way: it's not wrong for visual novels to not be a game. Some people like 'em that way, others don't. It's not as if one medium is inherently superior to the other, they just have different strengths. And it totally okay to like some mediums a bit more than others. Some people like reading, some don't. Some love movies, others like games better.

Now, if you'd like the play from hybrids (like, part VN, part adventure game), I'm sure we could recommend you some titles. Nearly all hybrids that were published in English were well recieved by both press and players alike. Except for Lux-Pain, thanks to a painfully awkward translation. But stay away from that and you're probably good :)
It doesn't necessarily have to be more gamey. Its more that the few moments of actual player interaction (the very occasional choices) feel arbitrary, yet contrived. They don't make much sense within the narrative. These game don't actually ask you if you want to go to pick up woman a) over woman b), they ask you if you want to go to place a) over place b), with the tacit understanding that by picking a seemingly random location, you will bump into one of these women. I feel that the games that do this might as well not even bother with the choice mechanic. If you are going to have it, present a meaningful choice.

That all said, I do tend to like the gamier ones. Or at least the ones that give me more regular and more meaningful influence over the story.
 

NPC009

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maninahat said:
It doesn't necessarily have to be more gamey. Its more that the few moments of actual player interaction (the very occasional choices) feel arbitrary, yet contrived. They don't make much sense within the narrative. These game don't actually ask you if you want to go to pick up woman a) over woman b), they ask you if you want to go to place a) over place b), with the tacit understanding that by picking a seemingly random location, you will bump into one of these women. I feel that the games that do this might as well not even bother with the choice mechanic. If you are going to have it, present a meaningful choice.

That all said, I do tend to like the gamier ones. Or at least the ones that give me more regular and more meaningful influence over the story.
I rarely play the dating type and I'm not really into dating sims either, but in the ones I played there's usually some sense to it. If you want to meet the nerdy boy with the glasses, going to the library is your best bet. And sometimes they're more like chance encounters. Like, decide to go shopping and you'll run into the token bad boy hanging out on the street.

Now, of course it's kind of ridiculous most character fit neatly into popular categories, but to many people that's the appeal of these games. Knowing what to expect is comforting. It's not any different from buying the new FIFA every year or playing lots of CoD-esque shooters.

I don't think this is a problem, as there are always games out there that do things differently or are self-aware enough to play with the tropes. I had a blast with Sweet Fuse [http://aksysgames.com/sweet-fuse/], where being assertive gets you the guy. Also, there's the whole 'murder games in theme park were all the rides are based on (fictional) games and you have to save your uncle, legendary gamedesigner Keiji Inafune before the time is up'.
 

SquallTheBlade

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maninahat said:
It doesn't necessarily have to be more gamey. Its more that the few moments of actual player interaction (the very occasional choices) feel arbitrary, yet contrived. They don't make much sense within the narrative. These game don't actually ask you if you want to go to pick up woman a) over woman b), they ask you if you want to go to place a) over place b), with the tacit understanding that by picking a seemingly random location, you will bump into one of these women. I feel that the games that do this might as well not even bother with the choice mechanic. If you are going to have it, present a meaningful choice.

That all said, I do tend to like the gamier ones. Or at least the ones that give me more regular and more meaningful influence over the story.
Have you only read more dating sim like VNs because those aren't the only types of choices there are. And usually those kind of choices are there to allow the reader to choose what kind of interactions the main character has and with who. Not neccessarily a bad thing. If you want to see more of character X then isn't it nice that you have the option to do so? And vice versa. If you don't like to see character Y some choices make you avoid this character.
 

ZiggyE

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maninahat said:
Also, the two game screens you provided don't disprove my point. The exceptions to a trend do not disprove the existence of that trend, and I had already acknowledged repeatedly that there are exceptions. This is what qualifiers like "often" or "most" are for.
The format in those images is known as NVL. There are literally hundreds of NVL VNs. [https://vndb.org/g43?fil=tag_inc-43.tagspoil-0;m=0;o=d;s=rating]
 

Entitled

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maninahat said:
What I really don't understand is how the fans have grown so accustomed to this standard, they think it is bizarre for others someone question it. Hell, you even said it yourself: "There's no reason to make special CGs for each scene, unless something interesting is happening it's just 2 or more people talking in a room." In a VN, two people talking in a room never looks interesting.
It's not that unusual, that fans of a medium or genre get used to a technical limitation, and identify it as a self-defining quirk.

For example turn based games exist because they were the first adaptations of tabletop games, that needed pen and paper to manually calculate all combat results. Objectively speaking, real time simulations are more efficient at the immersion that was the goal all along. But by the time we had enough computing capacity, gamers started to self-identify as people who care about levelling and inventories and numerical skills, even where they make no realistic sense.


For that matter, you might say that manga are more efficient than VNs, but manga itself isn't as efficient as anime, if you want to reduce everything to amounts of information broadcasted, and novels are not as efficient as movies.

For some reason, people stay attached to historically developed mediums, instead of just maximizing "efficiency".

maninahat said:
Okay, well I do know, it is because VNs are made as cheaply and as quickly as possible, so anything that might push up the production cost is out of the question. What I really don't understand is how the fans have grown so accustomed to this standard
Yes, that's part of the reason too. Telling VN devs that they should experiment with making every scene a CG, is a bit like telling mangaka that they should draw enough to make every scene animated. And this point we are talking about orders of magnitudes of different production values, if you still want to tell the same amounts of narrative.

If VNs would be limited to shorter, more comics-like scenes, with quicker and more intense storytelling, to stay affordable, then stories like Ever17, Fate/Stay Night, or Higurashi couldn't have been told.

Well, a variation on their themes could be told, as seen from their adaptations, but not the detailed worldbuilding and elaborate plotting that made them popular in the first place, and that's foreknowledge made their adaptations appealing to most.
 

Someone Depressing

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SquallTheBlade said:
Someone Depressing said:
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.
I mean that it's almost depressing in that it's heavily related to the NEET and hikikimori issue in Japan. If someone who has a stable life and a job also had a hidden collection of 8-year-olds getting their limbs torn off while wearing lolita outfits, so what? I don't care. But the fact that these games/stories/media/whatever you want to call them are being sold and marketed to people who pressured by society into the situation they're in is the part that just makes me lose faith in Japan ever getting out of the rut that its younger generation has found itself in.

I don't care what kind of porn that people like. Everyone likes stuff that others will find freaky and/or terrifying. But when that stuff is damaging an already strict and harsh society like Japan's, that's when a line must be drawn and this medium analysed.
 

Mutant1988

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Someone Depressing said:
I mean that it's almost depressing in that it's heavily related to the NEET and hikikimori issue in Japan. If someone who has a stable life and a job also had a hidden collection of 8-year-olds getting their limbs torn off while wearing lolita outfits, so what? I don't care. But the fact that these games/stories/media/whatever you want to call them are being sold and marketed to people who pressured by society into the situation they're in is the part that just makes me lose faith in Japan ever getting out of the rut that its younger generation has found itself in.

I don't care what kind of porn that people like. Everyone likes stuff that others will find freaky and/or terrifying. But when that stuff is damaging an already strict and harsh society like Japan's, that's when a line must be drawn and this medium analysed.
So because of the severity of issue A (Social withdrawal) that is not caused to issue B (VNs - A medium, not a genre), issue B should be analysed?

I also must say that it's amazing that you found porn when you went looking specifically for porn. I would never have expected that.
 

maninahat

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inu-kun said:
maninahat said:
SquallTheBlade said:
maninahat said:
]Look at how in a single page of a manga or a comic book[/url], even something as simple as a conversation between two people will involve the "camera" moving around the room from panel to panel, focusing on different things, capturing the people and the story from different angles. It does a lot to set a tone, emphasis or a dynamic without having to depend on what is being said by the characters. It's so rare to see a comic not use these techniques that it actually becomes an neat story telling trick when it does pop up. [http://4thletter.net/wp-content/uploads//thiefofthieves-01.jpg]
Good thing that VNs use music to set a tone, emphasis or a dynamic without having to depend on what is being said by the characters.

In VNs though, there is no effort to experiment with these options despite being a primarily visual medium.
But that's just wrong. The novel part is primary, not the visuals. If you were expecting good visuals you had very very wrong mindset. Though that doesn't mean that no VN tries to do stuff visually. Fate/Stay Night comes to mind as an example.

Hell, you even said it yourself: "There's no reason to make special CGs for each scene, unless something interesting is happening it's just 2 or more people talking in a room." In a VN, two people talking in a room never looks interesting.
There are many reasons why two people talking in a room can be interesting. The dialogue and the interactions between those characters for example.
If it is the novel part that is the primary part (in spite of the name "visual novel"), then it is still a bad format. The word part of a visual novel is often reduced to one/two sentence captions that appear on the screen one at a time. You can set an automated scroller to move from one line to the next, but if you have a fast enough reading speed, the autoscrollers are too slow and you have to move to the next line with a mouse click or space bar. That is a terrible way to have to read a novel.
Plays Diablo, no problem.

Plays VN, CLICKING ON THE MOUSE IS HARD!!!

Edit: Actually having a few lines is far better way to read, you don't have a problem of being distracted mid page and starting over.
I don't like the constant clicking in Diablo either. I find that even more annoying, and so does anyone else sitting in earshot. Perhaps it isn't the VNs I don't like, but repetitive strain injuries.
 

FC Groningen

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I've posted regarding whether I like the majority of the VN's earlier. Since then, people seem to be divided on whether they are "terrible" or "occasionally extremely good". My problem so far with VN's is that most of them follow the same guidelines, which on top of the little interaction and pace can make for a very boring experience.

I think Yahtzee commented on it in his older videos (some JRPG) in which he states that Japanese games tend to be full of text and in which plots are driven by characters blatantly telling everything.

As I said, most VN's I read so far follow the same route. Some introduction in which all characters are introduced somewhat which have a lighter tone. After a while, you have picked a (female) character you'll stick with for the rest of the game. For the sake of "character dept", some problems are introduced which can only be toppled together with the protagonist, which are mostly the same problems like daddy issues, a "wound" from the past, a bad childhood etc. Most of these issues are solved eventually with a firm speech of the protagonist, or playing the knight in shining armor in another way. After, the protagonist is rewarded with the girl and they happily live ever after.

My personal opinion on the matter is that forcing issues onto characters does not make for interesting characters. Humor, wit and character traits that stand out do much more than adding angst and drama each time. It's the reason I liked Grisaia no Kajitsu above all other novels, despite it resorting to angst and issues again later. The latter is what I tie directly to "Japan" and hence I'd love to see some Western visual novels.