Troons talking about how gender is a social construct (likely out of nowhere and shoeorned in.) Time or dimensional travel including paradoxes. Fan theories because the writing's intentionally inconsistent. THE WORLD IS A SIMULATION! A yaoi bait character for Tumblr. These are the things I expect to find in nearly every modern VN.
"Dude looks like a lady" is nothing new, but actually having the characters identify as trannies is annoying. Ditto once every VN uses the crutch of time travel/simulation it feels a lot cheaper, though sometimes it can work well. Though I don't remember any game with fan theories, at least not the usual niche ones.
Steins;Gate is a goddamn masterpiece. It's slow for a bit but it's all part of the plan so keep going. Unless you've already made the decision to play all the titles in order of release, start with that.
I really liked Chaos;Head NoaH. It's got a really good mix of perviness and horror that fits the late-2000s channer main character.
I'd say 5-6 hours maybe? I don't quite remember but is about right after looking up and comparing some other answers online that had spoilers in them that I'm sure you don't want to see. It's not like Muv-Luv where you're thinking you're gonna get a sci-fi epic but you have to read a slice of life first but everything set up there is used later on and just builds characters or concepts up for use later on in the story. There is definitely still some light tension similar to a non-storyline episode of a TV thriller so you won't be bored I don't think.
Once it gets going it's a genuine thrill in a way that defies the genre imo. It shouldn't take too long but it's worth it anyway.
It's always funny when people start realising that VNs are in the dozens of hours.
I've played other VNs. Some are well paced. I thought the first Somnium Files game and 999 (the remaster that let you quickly skip content you already saw) were good and started off with the plot pretty quickly. VLR did too, but there were some very long stretches of exposition about something the writer read about in Wikipedia that day.
I recently picked this up, so I'm hoping to get to it sometime in 2024. Backlog and all that.....
Depends really. Most of the classics like Clannad, S;G, Fate, etc are doorstoppers but you also got a large amount like Saya no Uta or Narcissu which are fairly succinct and short.
Most of the beloved classics in the genre are more than 40 hours long. Really makes it hard to share any of it with your bros.
Utawarerumono is incredible, definitely do that one too.
It makes me wonder how many pages these bigger games come up to.
By word count, much longer than War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time
All of Stephen King's published novels combined come to around 6 million words.
It's not that weird when you consider that most visual novels aren't just one story. They're multiple stories that all strive to have their own three act structure. Some individual game routes might be short; others, like Heaven's Feel, are an entire saga on their own.
