This seems easy, some people are fine with the writing in them and very obviously the quality of writing will vary between them
What's the appeal of Visual Novels?
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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Well, I'm not sure about the pure VN type games, while I have enjoyed a few of those, I couldn't tell you why. I have a friend who absolutely loves VN games but shes at work right now. I have had a blast with some more hybrid type VN games tho.
Such as Golden Treasure: The Great Green.
Although I'm not really sure how much I would call this a VN since there is a lot of choices and gameplay, but it tends to come to mind when I think VN so I'll include it. I have never encountered a game that really made you feel like something else, in the way you interacted with the world and how things are described. It really does do a fantastic job and its got a free trial that will carry over to the full game if you get it.
Lovers of Aether.
This one is cute and short, plus its an april fools joke that they made into a full game featuring characters from a smash brothers like brawler but in dating high school setting.
The Miskatonic.
A heavily lovecraft inspired VN where someone has poisoned the water supply and given all the women big boobs. Although they don't mention that part in the plot, its a bit more of a dark comedy mystery type game. Not much interaction but its cute enough.
Such as Golden Treasure: The Great Green.
Although I'm not really sure how much I would call this a VN since there is a lot of choices and gameplay, but it tends to come to mind when I think VN so I'll include it. I have never encountered a game that really made you feel like something else, in the way you interacted with the world and how things are described. It really does do a fantastic job and its got a free trial that will carry over to the full game if you get it.
Lovers of Aether.
This one is cute and short, plus its an april fools joke that they made into a full game featuring characters from a smash brothers like brawler but in dating high school setting.
The Miskatonic.
A heavily lovecraft inspired VN where someone has poisoned the water supply and given all the women big boobs. Although they don't mention that part in the plot, its a bit more of a dark comedy mystery type game. Not much interaction but its cute enough.
Saya no Uta is a very lovecraftian one as well but it's gory and disturbing on many levels. Still highly reccomended though if you like lovecraftian tales. Also it's written by the Urobucher (writer of Madoka and Fate Zero books haha). It's also relatively short for a visual novel, maybe takes 15 hours to see everything.
The themes are madness, loneliness and love. Story is about a guy who suffers head trauma and ever since only sees the world as a disgusting mass of flesh and organs and has to somehow live in that reality.
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Yeah, I think I've heard of that one. The Miskatonic is more of a dark comedy but not really gory, its got some body horror but its more of cartoony then... squicky.
The appeal? Stories really. In my particular case I'm one of those rare guys that actually likes romance stories but there... aren't any for guys, except for in visual novels. I've looked, everything that is a romance book, at least in America it seems, is for women. My avatar is even from a VN, Fegor, from Trillion: God of Destruction which, if you want to know what is the reaction of most people to it then let me share this helpful chart.
I am such a masochist. But anyway this is an example of a "raising sim" essentially with how it works so there's actually a decent amount of gameplay to it. You get to know people in your life and perhaps develop romantic feelings for them, only for them to then die one by one in an attempt to stop a creature from destroying the world. FUN!
Though not all VN's even have any gameplay at all or even choices, two of my favorites are Juniper's Knot and Planetarian.
Both have no choices in them an feature only two characters, the first involving a boy who meets a demon and the second involving a man who finds a planetarium and a robot. Neither are romances though they do involve emotional connections between characters.
I would share some of the romance VN's I enjoy but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to them even if they ARE on Steam. I will say that a personal favorite of mine is Da Capo 2, a lot of which is because of the banter between the characters, it really does feel like a bunch of friends clowning around with each other. And an added thing is that it has secondary male characters that are actually fun characters on their own, which is always a good sign that a VN is a keeper. And the other one is Sabbat of the Witch which had me bawling like a baby on Nene's route and has a male protagonist that isn't just a plank of wood but has actual motivations and problems he's dealing with.
Anyway, that's my two cents on this topic. I do have a lot more to talk about if anyone is interested.
I am such a masochist. But anyway this is an example of a "raising sim" essentially with how it works so there's actually a decent amount of gameplay to it. You get to know people in your life and perhaps develop romantic feelings for them, only for them to then die one by one in an attempt to stop a creature from destroying the world. FUN!
Though not all VN's even have any gameplay at all or even choices, two of my favorites are Juniper's Knot and Planetarian.
Both have no choices in them an feature only two characters, the first involving a boy who meets a demon and the second involving a man who finds a planetarium and a robot. Neither are romances though they do involve emotional connections between characters.
I would share some of the romance VN's I enjoy but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to them even if they ARE on Steam. I will say that a personal favorite of mine is Da Capo 2, a lot of which is because of the banter between the characters, it really does feel like a bunch of friends clowning around with each other. And an added thing is that it has secondary male characters that are actually fun characters on their own, which is always a good sign that a VN is a keeper. And the other one is Sabbat of the Witch which had me bawling like a baby on Nene's route and has a male protagonist that isn't just a plank of wood but has actual motivations and problems he's dealing with.
Anyway, that's my two cents on this topic. I do have a lot more to talk about if anyone is interested.
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They're not quite porn, but there's a reason so many of them (including the ones the OP listed) are focused heavily on getting to know anime girls with short skirts and massive boobs.
The story is the equivalent of the bit at the start of a porn film where the guy turns up to fix her washing machine.
The story is the equivalent of the bit at the start of a porn film where the guy turns up to fix her washing machine.
That's entirely dependent on what VN you're reading. You don't say all movies are porn just because there are porn movies.
True, though I am curious what the percentage of porn VN to non-porn VN is. Because most of the ones I see advertised are definitely sexually suggestive, and clearly indicate the focus of the game is to get intimate with one of the other characters. Even if it's just hand holding level of explicit, I still categorize it as in the same bracket as the porn VN's. The focus is relationship/romance, with or without squishy bits and segois (however you spell that Japanese word). I can't recall, off the top of my head, VN's where the main plot ISN'T romance/sex. Not saying they don't exist, just saying I never really see them pushed at all.
That is true, fair enough. But the balance is very different with Visual Novels; the dating sim/ shipping aspect is very prevalent in the history and origins of the VN medium, to an extent far beyond film.
More than half of the ones I see advertised (or available in Steam) fit what I've described, with the short skirts & exaggerated "coy" expressions.
Is it though? I mean, there are a LOT of porn films out there on the web. Like....whooole bunches of porn. Like, porn parodies of other porn movies. Pornception if you will.
Most romance in real life will have an element of sex in it. Sexual reproduction, children, is the major reason for courtship and sexual satisfaction, regardless of our intellectual feelings on it being surface level, are still considered an important aspect of a relationship for many people, not just because it's nice to feel good but because it is a way of informing a partner how much you desire them.
What I mean to say by all that is that you can't just look at a VN with sex in it and determine its primary function is porn. What is the ratio of porn to text? Many VN's will have the vast majority of them made up of relationship drama and "cuteness" and only have sex as something that comes up near the end. Others will have sex as the majority of the content with only an "excuse plot" there to give flavor and context, while still others are some mix of the two.
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True, same as you can't call the Witcher or Witcher 3 a porn game even tho they both have nudity and sex in them.
I am well aware that most real life romance has element of sex in it. I exist in real life, have had relationships, and there was sex. That's not news.
My point is that I am curious about what the actual ratio of games where the main point of the VN, is romance/sex. Whether it's explicit on the screen, complete with squishy sounds and squeaking Japanese girls whimpering Onisan, doesn't really matter to me. If your game's entire point is "Who of these 5 or so people will you hook up with?" then to me it's a romance/sex VN. And I'm curious, how many fall into that category, as opposed to VNs where that ISN'T the driving focus of the gameplay. If it's there tangentially, then fine, but if every scene, and choice you make, is built towards advancing various relationships, it's a relationship VN. Because simply based on the various adds I see for them on youtube, and websites, etc, it seems to be exclusively relationship VNs. Again, I'm not saying NONE of them are of a different type, I'm just saying I never see those advertised anywhere.
Over 50% of what you'll find on the most mainstream distribution networks? Methinks not quite.
I have no real idea. I could make a poor attempt to by looking at the list of titles that are sold on one of the VN sites I go to but that'd have to wait till I'm off work. What I can say is that romance and erotic VN's made up the vast majority of VN's for several decades but we've seen the medium open up to other genres over the past 20 years as they've become more accepted in the mainstream.
Not sure what you've played but most normal VNs with sex scenes (and not all of them have sex scenes) and not nukige are extremely long actually. So it's less what you describe and more watching 1-2 seasons worth of anime between each sex scene. At that point it isn't porn and is just storytelling without prudish morality. It's dating simulation with all of the aspects of dating incorporated and not just a random 5 minute porn film setup.
Take fate stay night, it's over 50 hours long over 3 story routes and has maybe 7 or 8 sex scenes throughout that, the first two routes have 1-2 sex scenes each and are 15-20 hours long, so the ratio is something like 45 hour of non-sex content and 5ish hours of story-relevant sex content. Not sure anyone can maintain a boner for 10-15 hour segments hoping to get to the sex lol. Maybe just maybe it's just normal storytelling and the presence of sex just confuses the fuck out of western sensibilities and people don't know how to categorize it lol.
There's way more live action porn than there's animated/drawn porn. Thing is, to normies, animated content is either childish cartoons or porn, they don't know of its other aspects.
I remember watching this video on youtube a bunch of years ago, it was this british localization expert talking about the anime market in the 90s. They ran some sort of magazine and based on their sales there were maybe 10.000 active anime fans at the time that would purchase monthly anime vhs releases. But things like hentai films would easily sell over 60.000 copies. So it wasn't the anime fans who were watching it, since there's no anime fans who just only watch hentai. So what you actually have is a whole bunch of other irrelevant folk who just are into it for the porn and are fully ignorant about other aspects involved here. This shapes the image we see being described here.
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Hatoful Boyfriend comes to mind; although using romance as means to reveal the main plot is more of a subversion of visual novels than an example.
There's also quite a bit of context that is lost if one doesn't have these scenes in many VN's. In The Devil on G-string, I lost important character and relationship progression details as well as ton of context in Kanon's route because the Steam version doesn't have those scenes.
In Da Capo 2, on Anzu's route, the only sex scene is right at the end of her route and the gist is that the story has a a central yet also background element of a tree that grants wishes, Anzu is a girl who had memory problems and made a wish to be able to remember everything, while Yoshiyuki was created through the wish of the creator of the tree. The tree is dying and it's caused Anzu to stop remembering people, while Yoshiyuki is starting to cease to exist, not just physically, but also in the minds of other people. The sex scene at the end is a bonding moment between the two and somehow (Because magic) through their desire to not be apart, causes Yoshiyuki to not disappear despite the death of the tree and for Anzu retain memories so long as they are related to Yoshiyuki. It's a very romantic and powerful moment while still being a sex scene.
I dunno. To me, it really depends on the thing you are playing. Phoenix Wright is kind of like a visual novel except there are some gameplay elements. That game is amazing.
I guess I see your point if you are doing not much except reading text throughout the whole thing.
if there are choices in the game, that’s more appealing to me as I have a say over the outcome. You can’t do that in a book.
Also, maybe it feels more interactive than reading a book because of the graphics and button input despite the fact it’s basically the same.
I guess I see your point if you are doing not much except reading text throughout the whole thing.
if there are choices in the game, that’s more appealing to me as I have a say over the outcome. You can’t do that in a book.
Also, maybe it feels more interactive than reading a book because of the graphics and button input despite the fact it’s basically the same.