Visual Novels

[Marissa Moira]

It will never not piss me off how much more those artists could do with their beautiful work, just to be yet another forgettable throwaway waifu hentai game rushed out in under a year. Or another copy paste dungeon crawler set in high school. As if those are the only possible games on the planet and life is never ever enjoyable outside of high school and drawing sex is the apex of human achievement that totally hasn’t already been done by millions throughout history.

George Lucas really was right. They only let you make very specific kinds of games/movies in the Industry if you arent funding out of pocket. Though most of these VN’s are made by Japanese hobbyists in their spare time.

Well you also have to remember where VNs came from, the older titles in their day had limited gameplay elements to show off their graphics because they couldn't do amazing visuals and have expansive gameplay systems because that would have been too costly or not fit on the media device. Similar to how Lucas Arts games were made. So VNs used their impressive visuals as a major factor. Even looking at the Sega Saturn the first Sakura Wars game was not deep from a gameplay standpoint, but it had stuff like compressed video and audio which at the time was considered impressive for a game.

But now we've reached a point where games can have good visuals and gameplay systems which leaves visual novels to be more of a relic. So you're getting these hentai games to try to scrape out what's left of the remaining audience because many have moved to mobile gaming and play stuff like Nikki Goddess of Victory. Mages wasn't ever going to be able to muster a team that could make something that's on par with Persona or Like a Dragon. The audience today demands more than just having a story.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

The later Steins Gate entries are never as decent as the first one. The other SA spinoffs are also just as lacking, Robotics Notes wasn't anything special to write home about.

If they're entering insolvency it's going to probably follow what happened to Telltale Games, the IPs will still exist but the company won't.

Shut the fuck up, nigger.

 

[ShitLurker]

But precisely the thing I like about Visual Novels is that they are simple projects that allow weird, funky and crazy shit to be done since it doesn't have to go through a committee. It's the same reason I always like to keep an eye on Indie RPGs (and well, indie games in general). That they feel the need to "compete" defeats the point, your game SHOULD be on a shoestring budget and the most expensive thing in there should be the voice acting if any.

I look at Robotics;Notes and the only thing I see is waste with doing polygonal models with shitty canned animations that have to be reused constantly when the static character portraits from Steins;Gate would get the job done so much better AND cheaper. Same exact sensation with Zero Escape, the first game had fantastic art, comes game two and it's early PS2 shitty models, Christ what a downgrade...

Anywho, coming back from my tangent. The moment a VN has a budget bigger than peanuts, unless it's from a really established license and wants to add some animation or it has real gameplay under the hood, you probably are already fucking up. I mean, fuck, the most fun VN I've read in the last year was fucking Snoot Game.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Anywho, coming back from my tangent. The moment a VN has a budget bigger than peanuts, unless it's from a really established license and wants to add some animation or it has real gameplay under the hood, you probably are already fucking up. I mean, fuck, the most fun VN I've read in the last year was fucking Snoot Game.

Medium to Large budget pure story stuff describes Life is Strange or the majority of stuff David Cage has worked on. They by and large have not cratered.

If a title fails it's either going to be the fault of the script or the lack of engaging elements, these titles don't exist in a vacuum. If they're being released on a game console you have to factor in that many companies can do a good story on top of having a full functioning game and that VNs will be priced similarly to a real game. Witch on the Holy Night is $60 for example.

 

[BananaSplit²]

Now that you mention Aokana, how is that one?

It's in my backlog so I can't tell how good it is yet.
So far the games in the genre I've played (in no particular order) were:
-Shin Hayarigami 1 & 2
-The Fruit of Grisaia
-Memories Off 5 & 6
-Little Busters
-Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 1 & 2
-Famicom Detective The Missing Heir
-Shiin (Death Mark)
-Flowers Eté
-Return to Shironagasu Island
I'm currently doing 'Kami-sama no Youna Kimi he' which is a SoL visual novel featuring Kaito the hacker known as 4chan who helps his friends with his computer skills, in a world where artificial intelligence and security systems are dominating nearly all infrastructures. Lara is the most interesting heroine so far in the common plot route, taking herself the role of a private detective as a hobby.


also friendly advice, but you should ignore the posts from the autistic larper and attention-whoring Marissa Moira. His rambling and messy posts should at least tell you already that he doesn't play video games, let alone visual novels.

 

[BirdUp]

go read a book

 

[GenociderSyo]

Have you tried Death Marks sequel? It was pretty good too. Hopefully the third game gets out soon.

 

[ShitLurker]

It's in my backlog so I can't tell how good it is yet.
So far the games in the genre I've played (in no particular order) were:
-Shin Hayarigami 1 & 2
-The Fruit of Grisaia
-Memories Off 5 & 6
-Little Busters
-Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart 1 & 2
-Famicom Detective The Missing Heir
-Shiin (Death Mark)
-Flowers Eté
-Return to Shironagasu Island
I'm currently doing 'Kami-sama no Youna Kimi he' which is a SoL visual novel featuring Kaito the hacker known as 4chan who helps his friends with his computer skills, in a world where artificial intelligence and security systems are dominating nearly all infrastructures. Lara is the most interesting heroine so far in the common plot route, taking herself the role of a private detective as a hobby.
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also friendly advice, but you should ignore the posts from the autistic larper and attention-whoring Marissa Moira. His rambling and messy posts should at least tell you already that he doesn't play video games, let alone visual novels.

Thanks for the suggestions. And yeah, I've lurked long enough to be very aware of Marissa's Sony dickriding ways, but I do agree with him that even though Steins;Gate blew up hard and I loved, the rest of their stuff has been fine at best. Chaos;Head was fine but a bit of a chore at times, Fate;Zero I liked but was expecting a bi more and Robotics;Notes was an outright letdown. Of what's considered good I only have Chaos;Child left but I have a bigger desire to go into the Steins;Gate dating fanboy game than go into that one honestly. I still don't want them to die, but I do think they got too big for what they were actually moving.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

Medium to Large budget pure story stuff describes Life is Strange or the majority of stuff David Cage has worked on. They by and large have not cratered.

If a title fails it's either going to be the fault of the script or the lack of engaging elements, these titles don't exist in a vacuum. If they're being released on a game console you have to factor in that many companies can do a good story on top of having a full functioning game and that VNs will be priced similarly to a real game. Witch on the Holy Night is $60 for example.

Shut the fuck up nigger.

 

[Jewthulhu]

But precisely the thing I like about Visual Novels is that they are simple projects that allow weird, funky and crazy shit to be done since it doesn't have to go through a committee. It's the same reason I always like to keep an eye on Indie RPGs (and well, indie games in general). That they feel the need to "compete" defeats the point, your game SHOULD be on a shoestring budget and the most expensive thing in there should be the voice acting if any.

I look at Robotics;Notes and the only thing I see is waste with doing polygonal models with shitty canned animations that have to be reused constantly when the static character portraits from Steins;Gate would get the job done so much better AND cheaper. Same exact sensation with Zero Escape, the first game had fantastic art, comes game two and it's early PS2 shitty models, Christ what a downgrade...

Anywho, coming back from my tangent. The moment a VN has a budget bigger than peanuts, unless it's from a really established license and wants to add some animation or it has real gameplay under the hood, you probably are already fucking up. I mean, fuck, the most fun VN I've read in the last year was fucking Snoot Game.

If 3D models and animations ruin a visual novel, why not just make a book? Or a comic, if the visuals of anime tits are that important. One of my biggest complaints already with visual novels is that they horribly underuse the interactive visual medium to the point where I'm better off reading a book or playing an actual game.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Watching Lucky Star and seeing all the shout outs and stuff, like Konata being a huge fan of stuff like Shuffle, To Heart, Air, etc and then when I discover they're pretty much all hentai games..........why Japan love underage looking girls. Ffs.

 

[ShitLurker]

If 3D models and animations ruin a visual novel, why not just make a book? Or a comic, if the visuals of anime tits are that important. One of my biggest complaints already with visual novels is that they horribly underuse the interactive visual medium to the point where I'm better off reading a book or playing an actual game.

Dude, you cannot tell me that in the cases of Robotics;Notes and Zero Escape 2 it isn't strictly worse. Ai the Somnium files did do it a lot better but also had actual gameplay in the rooms, so got more use out of doing 3d. But if you are going to half ass it, and have no reason to use 3d models outside of not using drawings, what's the point? Hell look at Danganronpa, some 3d in there but 2d flair up the ass.

The other point of the medium is the choose your own adventure aspect. The VN I enjoy the most have branching paths with a good number of choices, endings and dead ends. Something that a book or comic will do in a much clunkier way.

Finally, I like my projects small since it allows the writting team to go more nuts. On one hand, no way in fucking hell something like Saya no Uta could come out of a bigger project like an Anime without dialing it down a lot and as a book or comic you are missing on the music and sounds, all of that works in tandem. On the other, I rather have 3 more scenarios even if the presentation isn't as cool because it's 3 more possible outcomes with all the fuckery that could entail. The first VN I went through was Fate Stay Night, visual flair was almost non existent but it was still hype as fuck and having 3 very different and very realized routes was one of the bigger highlights.

I do agree that you can do more with the format sure, you have your phoenix wright and Danganronpa with investigation elements, your Uta or Digimon Survive with TRPG gameplay or your very elaborate presentation like Until Dawn. But again, all of those are much bigger projects while your bog standard VN lets a couple of fuck ups tell a story that in any other situation would be a no show, and every once in a while you find a diamond in the rough in there (Snoot Game).

 

[BananaSplit²]

go read a book

Learn moonrunes my friend. And watch your brain growing out like a tumor after memorizing a large amount of kanji radicals and various characters

Have you tried Death Marks sequel? It was pretty good too. Hopefully the third game gets out soon.

They're in my backlog as well and Shibatomagire (the second sequel) just came out in Japan this December 1st.

Thanks for the suggestions. And yeah, I've lurked long enough to be very aware of Marissa's Sony dickriding ways, but I do agree with him that even though Steins;Gate blew up hard and I loved, the rest of their stuff has been fine at best. Chaos;Head was fine but a bit of a chore at times, Fate;Zero I liked but was expecting a bi more and Robotics;Notes was an outright letdown. Of what's considered good I only have Chaos;Child left but I have a bigger desire to go into the Steins;Gate dating fanboy game than go into that one honestly. I still don't want them to die, but I do think they got too big for what they were actually moving.

It wasn't exactly a list of suggestions I had in mind, but I'm glad there are some things that might interest you. That said, Shin Hayarigami, Memories Off and KamiKimi are japanese-only so they may be out of reach for you.

If 3D models and animations ruin a visual novel, why not just make a book? Or a comic, if the visuals of anime tits are that important. One of my biggest complaints already with visual novels is that they horribly underuse the interactive visual medium to the point where I'm better off reading a book or playing an actual game.

It depends how competent the team is able to make non-weird 3D models or animations (that don't look as the portrait drawings are just stretching in & out like rubber for instance). I honestly liked the animations in the Famicom Detective remake but those two games had a much bigger budget and larger team of talents with Nintendo's backing & management. Likewise for the Ace Attorney games from Capcom. You can't expect this kind of quality from smaller dev teams to be fair, they shouldn't bite more than they can chew by trying to compete.

VNs specifically developed for consoles tend to have more gameplay/interactive elements than your average eroge on PC. Or more exactly, it's easier to spot them on consoles than the over-satured market on PC. However, the problem is that they're most often japanese-only, with no full fan-translation either so they simply fall under the radar for us westerners.
Fuuraiki (from FOG) for example is a japanese countryside traveling/tourism simulator where you have to go to different places to trigger scenes and take pictures for your daily blog articles. Shin Hayarigami (from Nippon Ichi Software) has a lot of prompt choices, some requiring a courage point from your gauge (which can lead to gameovers too), with pressuring interrogation sequences and a blue board to link the relationships/roles of the characters in the criminal cases (required to complete before reaching their climax). The first Shin game has a main route with variant scenarios unlocked after the first playthrough, while the second Shin game has a different criminal case for each succeeding chapter (all of them have a human or supernatural ending upon the choices of the player). Shiin feels rather familiar to a dungeon crawling game although that's not surprising since it's made by a studio experienced (heh) to that genre.

I think Return to Shironagasu Island was originally a PC game (even if I played it on Switch) as it often plays like a point-and-click although it's the typical "click on everything until you waste all dialogues in order to proceed". The parts with the countdown timer were a bit weird because it was easy to lose precious time on reading the text boxes/listening to the VA and obtain a game over. The part where you have to defuse a bomb got me several retries. I still enjoyed it in spite of the jankiness.

That said, I don't mind the more "visual novel" approach with the occasional prompt choice and bad endings (if there are). I'm not expecting great literature either but something to entertain me at least. I could understand anyone not wanting to spend something like 60 bucks on them, or higher if you pay JP prices.

 

[Smug]

Watching Lucky Star and seeing all the shout outs and stuff, like Konata being a huge fan of stuff like Shuffle, To Heart, Air, etc and then when I discover they're pretty much all hentai games..........why Japan love underage looking girls. Ffs.

Every time people act like Japan is some sort of based country, the Visual Novel industry (and anime/manga/etc.) quickly reminds the world of their own unique flavour of degeneracy which they apparently can't let go of. There are a couple of really interesting VNs out there (Umineko/Fata), but I'd never dream of recommending VNs to anyone as an entertainment medium because of how insanely degenerate it reliably is in general.

The moment a VN has a budget bigger than peanuts, unless it's from a really established license and wants to add some animation or it has real gameplay under the hood, you probably are already fucking up. I mean, fuck, the most fun VN I've read in the last year was fucking Snoot Game.

You see that in every other medium as well. Passion projects made by creators who really give a fuck almost always end up being great, and the reverse is also true: such as pretty much any capeshit movie released in the last couple of years.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Every time people act like Japan is some sort of based country, the Visual Novel industry (and anime/manga/etc.) quickly reminds the world of their own unique flavour of degeneracy which they apparently can't let go of. There are a couple of really interesting VNs out there (Umineko/Fata), but I'd never dream of recommending VNs to anyone as an entertainment medium because of how insanely degenerate it reliably is in general.

Yeah, I don't even play many of them and it's often present. I recently played through Steins Gate 0 and Daru seemed to literally want to fuck his daughter. If they played it off as a gag then that'd be one thing, but they don't really seem to. At one point she talks about her past and how he would try to take baths with her when she was young. At another point she's nude and he's making derogatory comments.

It's creepy and degenerate for sure. At least Japan is on the other side of the earth and their everyday culture doesn't seem to be shoving an agenda down everyone's throats. Just seems they're a bunch of sex starved perverts who can't repopulate because they're busy fapping to tentacle porn. It's much easier to turn a blind eye to at any rate.

 

[BirdUp]

Learn moonrunes my friend.

i had a fever for five minutes when i tried severing the tie between the online hypersigil and me

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I see Visual Novels as completely different from literature. The biggest factor is the ability to change the course of the story, which can lead to better insight into characters and plot than what's possible.
Besides that the inclusion of sounds and visuals involves setting the mood better, and can allow for more complex stories due to having easier time explaining locations and events. For example a non linear story.

Watching Lucky Star and seeing all the shout outs and stuff, like Konata being a huge fan of stuff like Shuffle, To Heart, Air, etc and then when I discover they're pretty much all hentai games..........why Japan love underage looking girls. Ffs.

I haven't played those, but considering the rest of Key's output I doubt it's anything more than few sex scenes over dozens of hours of playtime. In which case they are as much porn as any other piece of media/literature that includes describing a sexual act.

 

[BananaSplit²]

Every time people act like Japan is some sort of based country, the Visual Novel industry (and anime/manga/etc.) quickly reminds the world of their own unique flavour of degeneracy which they apparently can't let go of. There are a couple of really interesting VNs out there (Umineko/Fata), but I'd never dream of recommending VNs to anyone as an entertainment medium because of how insanely degenerate it reliably is in general.

I don't like policing thoughts when it comes to artistic/fictional works and that ultimately means accepting the good and bad luggage which comes with said free speech. There are things that can disturb me but as long as they remain a drawing, they don't actually harm anyone and I can stay away from the shit that bothers me. English localizations of regular japanese games also prove that anglo/american grown adults can be offended by virtually anything, thus giving the impression they can't distinct between reality and fiction.

Anyway, I just play handheld console versions of eroge VNs as porn scenes are of zero value for me to understand that two characters finally tied the knot. And besides, said ports can include new stuff (characters, routes, scenes) to compensate the lack of graphical sex, not to mention I find the handheld format to be comfier for reading in long sessions. The Switch version of KamiKimi has, for example, the new redhair female character that makes fun of MC for being a loner who can't quite remember people's names.

Like, scenes of marriage and happy family are enough to warm my heart and Abe's

 

[Jewthulhu]

I'm not expecting great literature either but something to entertain me at least.

That's my main problem. If you're going to do the bare minimum in terms of "gameplay," there should at least be a great story (or really fucking immersive/mind-blowing atmosphere). While having a "choose your own adventure" type story works in RPGs, it feels like a crutch for general storywriting and typically results in weaker stories. And if you're going to have no gameplay and a meh story, you can at least make good visuals.
Then again, I am fairly picky in terms of stories.

 

[ShitLurker]

You see that in every other medium as well. Passion projects made by creators who really give a fuck almost always end up being great, and the reverse is also true: such as pretty much any capeshit movie released in the last couple of years.

Definitely, but it's on a lower threshold of entry. Videogamewise you can't go more basic than a raw VN, so it's realistic for 1-2 people to do a project from start to completion in a decent timefrane even if they aren't too code savvy. So that lower entry does allow a lot more shit to go through, but every once in a while something pretty cool pops out and it's something that in other circumstances would be a no show.

That's my main problem. If you're going to do the bare minimum in terms of "gameplay," there should at least be a great story (or really fucking immersive/mind-blowing atmosphere). While having a "choose your own adventure" type story works in RPGs, it feels like a crutch for general storywriting and typically results in weaker stories. And if you're going to have no gameplay and a meh story, you can at least make good visuals.
Then again, I am fairly picky in terms of stories.

Fair enough. And for the most part it's all mostly shit, but that low barrier of entry does sometimes let interesting stuff eek out. Also, I'd say RPGs are a lot worse for branching play, simply because they require more assets and mechanics.

I go back to Fate Stay Night, that would be 3 separate rpgs with different systems (feel and atmosphere are completely different between the 3 routes) with a common prologue if made as an RPG, definitely something I'd love to see, but very unlikely to have reached any sort of goal in anything more elaborate.

Western RPGs I know are better at giving choice and free form than jrpgs, but with the improvement of tech the branches have become smalker and smaller. The narrative varience found in Fallout original dwarfs the one im Fallout 4 for example.

As for nips and their degeneracy... I forgot how creepy Daru was in Zero and just reading how he behaves killed the little intetest I had in Robotics;Dash. I'm so used to their tropes that I just kind of zone out some of the creepier shit and well, yadda yadda drawings so gives me a degree of separation. I do enjoy some more fucked up stuff once in a while, like I've said prior, I "enjoyed" Saya No Uta, the incredibly oppressive atmosphere it generates is fantastic and though it definitely has it's gratuitous smut, I consider the experience worth it.

But I also think a good chunk of it is "adult content" being treated by very immature people as rape+gore. Akame Ga Kill is a manga I made the mistake of reading and it was just edgy shit for edgy sake and not the only Seinen I've read that felt that way. I expect more than a few creatives go full Coldsteel with how little red tape a VN is (well that, and VN that are just porn games).