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Let’s talk visual novels
(Inspired by this conversation thread)
Any and all thoughts on visual novels are welcome. Some potential questions for jumping off points:
What are your thoughts on the VN genre/format?
What are some of the best VNs you’ve played/read?
What would you recommend to someone who’s new to VNs and wants to try one out?
How do you think VNs compare to games, literature, and other interactive fiction?
Anime-style VNs are an interesting niche. And they will always be niche: the reader/player has to enjoy video games (and own a device capable of playing them), enjoy anime along with all its associated tropes, and enjoy reading... AND have a personality type that lets them chill out and enjoy the slower slice-of-life scenes, which will be prevalent in almost all titles.
Which brings us to: Characters. Characters are almost always the most important part of an anime VN. Intricate plot details are often forgettable, but a VN has succeeded when, years later, you still think back fondly on its characters. [Insert reminiscence about helping Nagisa overcome her fears with a drama club in CLANNAD; the noble Saber and haughty Rin Tohsaka and their adventures in Fate/Stay Night; the mysterious Touko Kuchiki and her wistful artwork in Kara no Shoujo; the wacky cast of Muv-Luv with Sumika and Meiya at the forefront; etc. etc.]
Admittedly, there is a tendency for VN writers to lean heavily on character archetypes, and this applies to anime/manga in general. The way I see it, writers use two tools to push their characters to transcend those archetypes: plot and relationships. Yes, I'm saying the plot can exist in service of characters and worldbuilding, and it doesn't have to be the other way around.
People coming from traditional literature may be surprised when reading VNs. They may carry over their usual expectations of a tight premium on wordcount, well-edited plots to eliminate repetition, a "show, don't tell" policy on characters, and may expect characters to just do their jobs as agents advancing some deeply insightful or mindblowing story.
It's no wonder people would be taken aback, then, when VNs spend a lot of time doing almost the exact opposite. They're traditionally extremely verbose, with a lot of slice-of-life "filler," lean on archetypes for familiarity, spend a ton of time showcasing the characters' interactions which have no bearing on the main story, and tend to state the obvious when it comes to internal monologue and such. The main plot may occupy only a fraction of the total word count.
I wouldn't waste my time recommending VNs to an average gamer, nor even an average anime watcher. Most people won't like them. That's obvious: it's niche.
And yet, I love VNs.
There's something about the way that a well-constructed VN's plot and characters take on alternating and intertwining roles in fleshing out the VN's world and creating some kind of impact on the reader. When the world and individual characters are presumed equally important, when the reader opens up a work knowing they will find a "favorite" character, it means the reader opens their mind to appreciating characters' mundane conversations, appreciate the half hour spent reading about characters drinking tea at the cafe, or talking about their favorite models of car and motorcycle, or going fishing, or walking in the woods looking for flowers, or whatever.
A VN enthusiast learns to appreciate the slow moments. Maybe a zen thing. Maybe it's a natural physiological response and adaptation to the familiar. You learn to like the thing just by spending more boring hours next to it. A kind of...wholesome Stockholm syndrome? Haha.
As others pointed out, the music is vital as well, and often it's the atmospheric tunes accompanying the slice-of-life scenes that can elicit the strongest emotional response years later. Artwork is an important selling point to draw people in, but the music is probably what stays with me, and I am definitely known to pull albums up on Spotify/YouTube/MP3s if I'm in the mood for some nostalgia some evening.
Recommendations? Since it's Halloween season, I'd echo others' suggestion of Danganronpa. Fun rollercoaster ride of death, accommodates mainstream players more than the average VN.
If you're looking for something darker and are okay with gory and NSFW scenes, there's Kara no Shoujo. A detective story based in Tokyo in the 1950s. One of my favorites. Play through once without a guide; you will feel lost and reach a dead end, but that's okay. Headphones required, to appreciate the music. I absolutely love the moody aesthetic, the music, the voicework on this one.
And then there's the When They Cry VNs. Umineko no Naku Koro ni is especially beloved in some circles. Crazy closed-room detective mystery in a mansion on an island, with witches involved. Probably the most mentally straining VN I've ever encountered, really demands your brain's full attention. Problem is it's maybe the longest VN I'm aware of, over 120 hours' read.
The House in Fata Morgana is a compelling story again involving a witch. Beautiful art. Significantly more thoughtful treatment of gender/sexuality issues than the average anime VN.
Honestly, I'm just a bit pissed at how rarely decent VNs in English get cell phone and/or tablet releases. It's the perfect VN platform! It's pick-up-and-play on something you'll have with you anyways! And what's more it seems (looking at VNDB) that it's fairly common in Japan, but for some reason it just hasn't caught on in English speaking countries. I mentioned before that one of the things that's great about the steam deck is that it's a great way to enjoy VNs on the go, but it's nowhere as good as those long-gone Intel Atom powered tablets that ran Windows.
While I would agree that those slice of life moments are one of the great things about VNs, I'll admit that I also have limited patience for them. That's the primary reason why I haven't even bothered with Umineko et. al.; I can tell from a thousand paces that I'll get tired of it before I finish it.
Now there's a head scratcher. My guess would be economics, as a good localization is fairly expensive and possibly differs between large and small screens, and the western VN audience is limited. And although the potential market of phone owners is massive, there is also massive competition on the business side of mobile gaming. So sadly I would guess the cost projections wouldn't give favorable numbers. But this is pure speculation.
I'm ecstatic there are amazing devices like the Steam Deck and other handheld PCs now. I missed out on the PS Vita which I've heard is a solid VN machine. Reading on the go: it just makes sense.
Haha, couldn't exactly blame you. It's ridiculously long at approx. 1.3 million words or 3600 pages, versus War and Peace's paltry 560,000 words or 1424 pages. I suppose I powered through while treating it as a rite of passage ("I must finish this"), and taking long breaks after each of the 8 chapters. Plus it's a compelling mystery!
To be fair, while Umineko gets too verbose, it's not "just" a murder-detective novel. It does IMO give fair treatment to some family domestic issues—I've read that the author Ryukishi07 was a social worker and knows enough about abusive dysfunctional families.
Many VNs on itch.io have Android releases, and some of those that don't (from itch.io or not) can be played on Android using Joiplay. If there's a .py or .rpy file inside the zip, it means it's a Renpy game and you can run it on Joiplay. That's how I'm playing Doki Doki Literature Club (which is free on itch.io!).
Joiplay is a bit finicky on Android 11, and I had to reinstall the Renpy plugin a couple of times after adding a new game. But it works.
@Akir.
I had no idea Joiplay was a thing! I'm gonna try that out.
I honestly find most of them extremely boring and feel like they'd be better realized as comic books. Simply clicking a mouse button over and over again isn't "gameplay."
There are exceptions where they're doing real game design, like Florence, but I think the ease of production in certain tools fills the zone up with a ton of low-effort stuff. Not to hate on people putting their stuff out there, good on them for trying, but there is so much amateur hour in the "genre" (and too much soft or hard pornographic content at that) that I'm just not inclined to even give it a shot.
Your opinions are valid, of course, but one thing you're missing is that the fact that VNs have such a low barrier to entry is one of the most spectacular things about it. There are a ton of VNs that are relatively low effort and built with little skill, but because of that you'll need to have something spectacular just to be remembered. That's why there are high-profile VNs as well, with a lot of them adding additional gameplay elements to add unconventional ways to engage with the story.
But in some ways the simplicity of the genre is an appeal in and of itself. We make movies that offer perfect performances and effects that extend what is normally possible in reality, yet we still have stageplays and even radio dramas.
Stage plays and radio dramas are their own art forms though. They’re not “lesser forms” of movies. Most VN’s I’ve seen aren’t really doing anything with the medium they’re in, it’s just the box that happened to be handy for the people making them because making a comic book is harder. It would be more like the difference between “The Room” and a really well executed stage play.
As a consumer, I honestly think there’s a sweet spot in barriers to entry where it’s just hard enough to where people have to really care to bother. It’s kind of like what happened with rage comic and image macro meme culture. When they’re fresh they’re really creative, once the automated tools come in it gets tropey and lazy.
VNs aren't lesser forms of comic books either. Just because there are lazy VNs does not mean that high quality ones are lesser for being in the same genre; to do so is like saying that all movies are bad because Son of the Mask was bad.
To be frank, I'm amazed that you can say that most VNs you have seen are not doing anything with the medium because the most popular ones (at least among English speaking audiences) tend to be the ones with the most gameplay elements added to them. Think of big series like Danganronpa, Zero Escape, or Ace Attourney. Digital: A Love Story certainly couldn't have been made into a comic book since it has no real art, and it uses it's interface to tell a story in a completely novel way.
Honestly, I really think that you do a disservice to the audience for VNs when you dismiss them as being made because comic books are harder. While, sure, art can be an important aspect of a VN, the most scrutinized part is always the writing, to the point that if you don't have a well written story you probably won't have much of an audience. And like I was trying to say before, VNs generally have high expectations of quality unless you're specifically looking for the lowest end stuff. By your logic you might as well say that people who aren't talented at writing VNs should try to write a fantasy novel instead.
As someone who doesn't love novels/books, I do have to say that I love VNs. My main problem with the former is that there's more of a "realistic" aesthetic to it (and even the more fantasy/sci-fi/etc stuff is still heavily westernized) while VNs are nearly entirely basically anime novels, which is perfect for me as a huge anime fan.
What I enjoy most about VNs is how they offer a more elaborate experience than anime and manga while still being in the same ballpark.
Admittedly I haven't played many yet since they're quite a time sink and I'm still an anime fan in the first place, but so far I think the Danganronpa games are definitely the peak for me.
As for an introduction to VNs, I think Danganronpa would be a good starting point. It's a bit atypical for VNs too as there's some gameplay, which might be more friendly to most. And it's just really exciting and full of twists and turns which is probably more palatable to most than a slow paced SoL.
Personally like I said before I'm not one for "regular" novels/books so VNs are far superior imo (though I get the impression that the general consensus is the other way around), and I wouldn't really compare them to games as games have an entire dimension of interactivity that is absent in most VNs (and VNs are far more elaborate in terms of dialogue the vast majority of the time).
One of the things I like about VNs is that they give the benefit of visuals without being distracting like comics can be. Comic books do a lot of visual storytelling and I'm a quick reader so it's sometimes easy for me to miss or misinterpret some of those visual details.
But more than anything I love that a VN is a combination of reading and listening to music. There's a long history of VNs with incredible soundtracks. Takeshi Abo has practically made his entire music career around them. At the same time, even a "bad" soundtrack can still do wonders to get you engrossed into the story.
VNs definitely have a big advantage over manga due to music and voice acting, yeah.
In what platform do you generally read visual novels? Console, PC, or portable devices?
PC. I played Danganronpa 1 and 2 way back on the PS Vita, but I'm 100% PC in general nowadays.
I don't have a lot of experience with VNs but my kid's playing around with basic programming concepts in Scratch and so I dived into it too. Just as a personal exercise I decided to build out a full-featured text rendering engine, which is pretty arduous in Scratch. Now that I've got it working I'm toying with the idea of building a VN with it. I guess it would be a VN, I'm honestly not sure what that label means exactly. Basically a branching-storyline choose your own adventure book, in game form. I grew up playing the classic text adventures so that's a bit of my inspiration, but I'm not building out a parser for free-form text input so it'll be limited to pre-written choices you can click on. I've been getting into Stable Diffusion lately so I'm thinking I might use that to generate some cool visuals to go along with the narrative. I can do some (rudimentary) state management with Scratch so that also opens up some possibilities beyond just emulating a book.
Now that I've got the technicals basically figured out I guess I have writer's block. I want to make something but I don't actually have a story to tell. I'm chewing on some Star Trek-esque space mystery but don't know where to take it. I'm also not sure if I should write it so player choice determines only the player's path through a fixed scenario, or if I should "cheat" and allow radically divergent backstories to emerge according to what questions are asked, if that makes sense. I'm curious to know if any of you have experience writing this sort of thing... tips are welcome. I know it can spiral into unmanageability pretty quickly if I don't follow a good process or strategize my approach.
I can’t find the article now, but I remember reading a good rundown from an interactive fiction writer/gamedev who talked about incorporating choices into games. They talked about how choices often create an insurmountable branching problem. If each choice is significantly meaningful and is meant to change the story, n binary choices can create 2n different outcomes, which quickly becomes unmanageable for any n greater than, like, 3.
They talked about ways around this. One way is essentially railroading the narrative to constrain outcomes but reflecting the player’s choices along the way. For example: your spaceship can land at the dock and be subject to a security checkpoint or land at the woods and be damaged in the process. Either way, the characters end up making it into the base they were going for, but the choice is still meaningful without branching the story. Later, elements from either scenario can be incorporated into, say, the ship’s departure, to extend the choice’s relevance — all without branching.
Another way is to not treat decisions as branches at all but instead more as sliders. If characters consistently make dangerous decisions, you might have a “recklessness” value that goes up over time. In the story, you can have certain scenes that trigger if that value is high enough. Think Fallout-style speech checks, only those aren’t seen by the gamer and are instead the way the game handles some events. Your character’s wrecklessness score is 80/100 and their relationship with the Empire is 20/100? They get hassled at the security checkpoint on landing and the player gets the opportunity to clap back at the guards. Instead, their wrecklessness score is 20 and they’re at an 80 with the Empire? They get a smooth landing and a warm welcome.
Mind you, I’m saying all of this like I’m an expert, but mostly I just read a good article a long time ago and have a very fuzzy memory of it, so take this with a grain of salt. I did actually make a small VN in Ren’py for Timasomo 2019, so I can legitimately say that I have done it myself, but I’ll also say that it was very short and not very choice-heavy in the first place.
I'm not sure if this link posted on Tildes a couple weeks ago is what you were thinking of, but it's relevant enough that it's worth surfacing here. It's a solid breakdown of a few different approaches for managing branching paths in CYOA style games.
Wasn’t that one, but it was very similar to that. That link is definitely a great rundown though. Hopefully it can give you some good ideas for your project!
I've often thought that another way may be to make the story very short. Have a wide, yet shallow decision tree- a short game that is significantly different every time you play it.
Games have too much time commitment today anyway, honestly. I'd love more games that I can complete in just a few hours.
My recommendation is to write out a 'main' story first, which contains everything you absolutely want players to achieve. Write your "true ending" if that's the kind of story you're going for. Write it without worrying about the technical aspect; pretend you're writing a stageplay script instead.
Then go back, figure out what other paths you want the player to take, outline them, and write them down the same way you did your 'main' script. Make sure you put notes as to where they go in the plot.
After you've got all that done, start working on the technical implementation of converting your script into whatever format you will need.
There are other ways you can go about this, of course, but this is what I recommend because it has you focus on the most important things first. But, yeah, it also means you'll have to figure out what you want your story to be first.
Since we've got this thread, I'd like to dig into this particular question a bit deeper with you.
Let's say my story has a big twist— surprise, your ally friend has been betraying you this whole time! Maybe you only uncover this secret under particular conditions, in a particular branch of the decision tree. Narratively, the betrayal is a fact that's outside of the player's control. So... does that mean the character should necessarily be betraying in every playthrough? Or would it be good for prior acts revealed in one branch as "sabotage" to be explained in parallel branches as "accidents" and allow the betrayer character to be a wholly innocent do-gooder when the player takes those paths?
I could go either way. I'm torn between two things: Either you play through once and the twists are revealed, making future playthroughs a lot less surprising/interesting... or nothing in-universe is knowable to the player because the facts are in flux until their choices collapse the proverbial wave function.
Just writing this comment out has been a clarifying exercise for me actually. I'm realizing that for that first scenario, a story could be crafted with lots of secrets, and only a few are revealed per playthrough. So you would need to play multiple times to uncover the Full Truth. And in the second scenario, I really like that analogy of quantum superposition; I'm wondering if that could be formally worked in as a ludonarrative device of some sort. Hmmm. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this.
As someone who isn't quite able to understand or appreciate the appeal of most visual novels, I must say that Analogue: A Hate Story left an impression years ago. Compared to other works that I have tried in the genre, it felt a little more innovative in its interactive mechanics, and a little more accomplished in its literary ambitions. It seemed to do a lot with relatively little, and did it quite elegantly.
Neo Cab was also an interesting experience, although flawed in some aspects to the point where I didn't finish it. And while I suppose they aren't really visual novels, I would say that Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You and Her Story borrow mechanics from the genre, and I liked both a fair amount. The narrative model of Her Story is actually quite similar to Analogue: A Hate Story.
A question for those who know more about visual novels: what works in the genre would you recommend for those of us who are interested in literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction), not particularly interested in manga or anime, and who would like to experience meaningful or at least interesting game mechanics? Do such titles exist?
I've been wracking my brain for the past few hours because you asked for recommendations in VNs that I'm not terribly interested in, but I'm sure they have to exist! Then I remembered Eliza, which might just be pretty close to what you're looking for. Though it may not have the gameplay mechanics you're looking for.
Thank you so much for taking the time and the effort! I've added Eliza to my "buy next" list and look forward to checking it out.
I haven't played it yet, but OPUS: Echo of Starsong came out last year and is currently 30% off ($17.49 USD) on Steam. It's quite a departure from the typical visual novel interface. Looks more like an adventure style game with a controllable avatar. The reviews look good. Supposedly an emotional story.
To be honest, I think the conjunction of interesting game mechanics and feeling like a literary work is rare if not nonexistent in this medium. Ones with game mechanics are easier to market to a wider audience, and that also coincides with more straightforward pop fiction stories.
It's a shame the anime/manga style and culture don't appeal to you, as that means I can't wholeheartedly recommend my favorite VN writer duo, Kouki Yoshimune and Hayato Tashiro. But I'll write about them anyway! They are absolute masters of the craft. They know their anime-watcher audience intimately, and know how and when to play it straight, cutesy anime tropes galore, and when to cut the BS and get real. How to set up and subvert expectations. How to get their audience to expect subversion and then subvert that. Love our cute characters? Well how about we sprinkle in a bit of gut-wrenching melodrama, some unimaginable challenges, force them to grow the hell up. Love this other character? Well...they can go ahead and develop normally, congrats.
Most importantly though, they know how to make things feel rooted in reality. Like their characters, when not performing comedy routines, are actual thinking human beings, with self-awareness, and made of both reason and emotion. That even some of the more fantastical events (oh boy) are given a proper treatment as to how they might be dealt with in our real world.
The titles are Kimi ga Nozomu Eien and Muv-Luv and should be experienced in that order. Yes, you read that right, one of my favorite pieces of VN literature ever is titled "Muv-Luv." No English translation for Kimi ga Nozomu Eien, but there is an anime adaptation which gets the point across. If anyone's interested, do watch the anime for Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. DO NOT watch the anime for Muv-Luv, which I've heard is not a great adaptation. I could gush a whole lot more about these stories but will stop in the interest of spoilers.
This indeed looks pretty interesting! Thanks!
For anyone interested, the Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trilogy (combo package with three excellent investigative visual novels, recently remastered for higher resolutions) is 50% off on Xbox (15 US dollars).
I recently realized that Xbox remote play is excellent for Visual Novels on my Android devices, so I'll probably be getting this.
these are all very recent impressions, I'm not a visual novels connoisseur
I started researching visual novels due to an interest in interactive fiction, and the perception that Ren'Py (a visual novel engine) kinda have everything I need. This led me to download a bunch of visual novels in an effort to understand what they actually are, and what is their appeal.
The reason I went for Ren'Py was that it seems to have better support for working with images and sound (when compared to Twine), and especially complex branching stories, dialogue trees, consequences, etc. I'm currently reading the documentation, and it seems that I was correct. However, most visual novels that I get for free on itch.io, as well as the paid ones I watched or had access to, use this feature sparingly.
My impression is that most visual novels are closer to actual novels than to CYOA books, and people seem to get a lot of joy from the simple act of advancing text while looking at barely updated character images.
With many notable exceptions, I believe visual novels (as a fictional genre more than a technology) are meant to be a relaxing activity. They allow for harmless emotions that players seek to achieve a sense of familiarity and comfort that is not unlike other formulaic media.
It is probably not a coincidence that so many VNs are stratified in subgenres within subgenres that more or less guarantee adherence to a highly specific set of expectations. The outcomes of the few choices that you make are either entirely obvious, ostensively telegraphed, or stated outright. A greater scope of obscure narrative choices might cause the player to feel distressed, breaking the narrative contract.
I experienced those emotions by playing the demo for the dating sim A Whole lot of Love, which catered to a somewhat specific romantic preference of mine, and, to a lesser extent, with the beginning of Doki Doki Literature Club.
In any case, whatever I decide to do with Ren'Py will probably not be a typical visual novel, but rather an interactive fiction game made with a visual novel engine.