What can be done with visual novels / dateing sims?

[sageoftruth]

My experience is basically limited to Persona 4 and a flash game from back in high school, but one thing I noticed about both of them was the idea of time management and stats. The thing is, with stats, it is often pretty simple. Raise your stats and more options become available.
What if there was a stat that could go up and down? I suppose Long Live the Queen kind of did this by having sliding temperament bars, but those merely affected her ability to learn skills. What if you had a stat like dignity that went up and down as you made certain decisions. Having high dignity would enable you take on more altruistic behavior, while having low dignity would make it so you're not too proud to do more depraved stuff, to win the hearts of bad girls.
As a bonus, there could be secret romances that you could only get via super high or super low dignity. At its lowest, you could basically romance a talking (in your head) body pillow.
Morality meters have already been a thing for awhile now, but I've never seen them put into practice in a dating sim.

 

[ZeroFarks]

Have a protagonist who isn't a wimpy, scrawny, mousy "totally average" schoolkid who's uncle owns a random business that only employs hormonally mutated girls with the collective average IQs of garden vegetables who, somehow, have apparently never seen a male human being before and, despite being employed for years by you're obviously creepy uncle, are all somehow still virgins.

Oh who are we kidding, that would be like asking Adam Sandler to make a movie that doesn't star himself playing a mentally deficient man-child who fakes overcoming crushing personal issues just long enough to score with a cute girl who is eight degrees out of his league.

Ok let's lower the bar, then: How about none of the girls have car tails, cat ears or are secretly hybrid cat-humans in any way?

Alright, fine. How about the girls have ambitions or goals in life besides working in your creepy uncle's dump until you came along to whisk them away to being part of your perfect harem ending?

Alright... then how about some sort of logical explanation of how you're character is going to ever make enough money to support the seven kids from the seven pregnant girls of your ex-virgin seven girl harem at the end of the story?

See, this is why I just play The Sims instead.

 

[Wary Wolf]

Alright... then how about some sort of logical explanation of how you're character is going to ever make enough money to support the seven kids from the seven pregnant girls of your ex-virgin seven girl harem at the end of the story?

See, this is why I just play The Sims instead.

I assume because in The Sims the seven girls and one guy scenario, it won't let you have children? ;p

The amount of peculiar sex VNs probably drowns out any legit VNs which attempt to focus more on story telling. Although there are some in which the sex is almost tastefully done (Tsukihime?). So a move away from the creepy/weird/octopus sex is a good start towards improving quality. As you say though, that's unlikely to happen anytime before the rat people conquer the world...

With a VN it's main advantage over a traditional novel is player choice (followed by CG galleries? I don't know). Therefore a good VN should expand largely on agency and allow for more dynamic choices. So on OC original concept, yes altering the protagonist's personality, looks, gender or sexuality would go a long way in making the medium less about porn, and more about art/creativity.

 

[Padwolf]

Do you know what I'd like to see more in VN's? More Otome Games! More visual novels where the protagonist is a girl and you choose from male/female/aliens/whathaveyou. I know, I know, there are many Otome games. BUT, there arent enough LONG ones that have a whole heap of depth and romance.

And what can't you do with a VN? it's a lot like reading a book but you have SOME visuals done for you. There are so many possibilities and so many stories to explore!

 

[Truth Cake]

Have a protagonist who isn't a wimpy, scrawny, mousy "totally average" schoolkid who's uncle owns a random business that only employs hormonally mutated girls with the collective average IQs of garden vegetables who, somehow, have apparently never seen a male human being before and, despite being employed for years by you're obviously creepy uncle, are all somehow still virgins.

Oh who are we kidding, that would be like asking Adam Sandler to make a movie that doesn't star himself playing a mentally deficient man-child who fakes overcoming crushing personal issues just long enough to score with a cute girl who is eight degrees out of his league.

Ok let's lower the bar, then: How about none of the girls have car tails, cat ears or are secretly hybrid cat-humans in any way?

Alright, fine. How about the girls have ambitions or goals in life besides working in your creepy uncle's dump until you came along to whisk them away to being part of your perfect harem ending?

Alright... then how about some sort of logical explanation of how you're character is going to ever make enough money to support the seven kids from the seven pregnant girls of your ex-virgin seven girl harem at the end of the story?

See, this is why I just play The Sims instead.

You're... you're just trolling, right? I would have thought that your whole post was just a poor joke if I didn't see similar opinions about VNs on this here website that actually turned out to be actual people and their actual ridiculous opinions.

Have you... ever actually played a VN that wasn't eroge, or at least one where the ero part was an auxiliary aspect at best? Or even LOOKED at like, anything from one, like a screenshot or some promotional art or something? Or had any sort of interaction with one outside of listening to someone else's hate speech about them, someone else who is probably as equally uninformed as you?

Like, I'd say I'm a pretty avid VN reader with a dozen-plus completed VNs (that is 100% complete, probably double that for non-complete) under my belt, and I've never come across anything resembling your first paragraph, and only 1 that fits the bill of your third paragraph that I can recall (Nekopara, I think it was called? It was on Steam, and I didn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because it looked pretty much just fanservice nonsense), and back to none again for the latter paragraphs.

Seriously, play pretty much any VN that isn't eroge (hell, even most eroge I've played aren't even close to what you've described)- and yes, there are quite a lot of them, just like there are quite a lot of movies out there that aren't pornography and quite a lot of card games that aren't strip poker- and be amazed that most of them are NOT wish-fulfillment nonsense! Hell, play literally ANY Otome VN! That literally cannot be anything you described because the main character is a girl, and a lot of them are quite good!

Seriously, your argument is basically the same as all those nutjob politicians that think that all video gamers are serial killers in training because "GTA and CoD, OMG!", You're condemning a whole genre/medium of storytelling because of straight-up misinformation.