The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss the Visual Novel genre of videogames. What are your favorites? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Hollow Knight, Nintendo DS, Monster Hunter, Persona, Monkey Island, 8 Bit Era, Animal Crossing, Age of Empires, Super Mario, Deus Ex, Stardew Valley, The Sims, Half-Life, Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
Huge chunk of “visual novel” standard by Western-based site are not actually considered visual novel in Japan (and visual novel fandom).
For example, Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright are not visual novel, but “adventure games/ADV.”
Even Nintendo’s Emio English promotional call it adventure games.
Anonymous;Code has been sitting in my library for too long, I really want to get started on it already! Sci;Adv is my favourite VN series.
Anyway, I started this cutesy-looking visual novel “Island” last week. I’m sure nothing bad or unexpected will happen in this story.
I wanted to get into the Sci;Adv after playing all Steins;Gates, but on PSVita most are available, but only in Japanese. I did some research on what to play where, but I might know Japanese before I have played those games
I think the official translations have pretty much only targeted PC/PS4/XBox. Pretty sure there are also no fan ports on the Vita.
For the best experience, playing on PC via Steam is the ideal setup - that way you can also install fan patches by Comittee of Zero, because the official translations have some continuity issues (along with untranslated backgrounds, typos etc.)
There are some patches, at least for S;G Elite and the spinoffs, work was being done on Robotics Notes, which apparently was completed 2 years ago. So I can play that atleast!
But I don’t really like playing visual novels on my pc, I like to play them in bed before I go to sleep
Ace Attorney is a classic that has been remastered all the way up to PCs, would reccomend it.
I’ve gotta put this one out there because it will largely get overlooked every time the topic of “Visual Novel” gets brought up, but Digimon: Survive.
As a tactics RPG, it’s pretty mid. Character growth and customization exists, but isn’t quite as expansive as I’d like for that kind of game. It’s no Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, but comparing it to other tactics games doesn’t do it justice, because it’s one of the better-to-best written visual novels I have ever played.
Each of the endings explores the way small changes in circumstance can heavily impact people’s decisions, each of the characters and their partner monsters are oozing with personality, and some of the potential outcomes for each character represents some of the most wild, fucked up, and human emotional responses possible. Your decisions as the main character have minor impacts in the lines of which characters reach their end of their growth arcs, and which evolutions are available to your partner and some of your companions partners, and the collective value system limits which of the main branches you’re permitted to explore for your ending. Which it doesn’t boast the wide assortment of branching narrative paths that some visual novels take, it does still succeed in making your decisions feel like they matter.
And this is completely aside from the fact that it’s a Digimon game. A franchise widely viewed as “for children”, yet it engages with heavy existential themes and doesn’t shy from letting horrible things happen to good, and bad, people. People die, on screen, in ways I would not want small children to see. In a lot of ways, the game is a functional “reboot” of the franchise, sharing a lot of commonalities with Digimon Adventure, but using older characters, more serious mature themes, and never referencing the monsters as “digimon”. In fact, the term is only used once, during the epilogue of one of the endings, otherwise they’re referred to as Kemonogami, and treated like Yokai. They’re engrained in the history and legendsof the world, and it’s an amazing take on the franchise.
I’m gushing at this point, but what really matters is it’s an extremely well-written visual novel with competent enough Tactical RPG gameplay, and also currently on a rather deep Steam Sale. Cannot recommend it enough.
Doki Doki Literature Club is the GOAT. Can any VN gamers recommend something similar? Every other VN game I’ve tried had me wishing it was just a book and quitting before the end.
