Also, the Phoenix Wright games are a pretty good approximation of this genre if you wanted to try it.
Just imagine it with all the gameplay bits replaced by dialogue choices.
Nope, those numbers come from the translated versions. It remains to be seen if accurate.
The 300 hours for Clannad are for the full game, so going through it once for each path. If you say that each of these pass can last 30-40 hours then the 300 hours number may be accurate.
Dunno about Umineko, has it even different paths?
Thanks for the write-up, Thasero. I particularly liked point 1 – the advantage of visual novels, as a storytelling medium, over books, anime, etc – and some of those gameplay mechanics sound interesting.
What are some of the best ones, in your opinion?
My picks would be:
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Fate / Stay Night. Undisputed king of the visual novels. I think that if you make games and want to learn how to do the “story” part of “branching story”, all you need to do is analyze F/SN.
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Baldr Sky. This is the cyberspace one with a very excellent game part. Think Neuromancer, except that all hacking is carried out through the process of giant mecha blowing each other up. Lots of science fiction fun with AI, cyberspace, and the like. This is the only game I know of that name-drops the Chinese Room thought experiment.
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Clannad. Above posters are not kidding about it being long, but that’s in part because of the unusual structure. After going through all the available story routes, a new route opens up that continues the story after the main character gets married and has a kid.
I know that Fate/Stay Night has an English fan translation, although I don’t know how good it is. You can get both F/SN and Clannad on Playstation 2 from play-asia.com, although you need a PS2 that can play Japanese discs. I do recommend that for F/SN, because the original PC version did not have voice acting, and the voice work in the PS2 version is quite good.
I’d also add a warning that you shouldn’t do what I did, which was buy Fate/Stay Night, get excited by how great it is, and then buy another visual novel that hasn’t been specifically recommended by someone else on a forum. F/SN is to visual novels what, say, Half-Life 2 is to shooters. Unless you’re careful, the next game you buy after that will be more of a Dark Void.
The Fate/stay night English fan translation is quite competent, and it’s either that or the Realta Nua (which is what the PS2 version is called) patch developed by someone else that goes on top of it that adds the voice acting in. The latter patch also replaces some of the graphics with the improved PS2 version and adds a bonus chapter or something. I dunno what all. I’m told you want it, though.
I think the first game I played in this genre that I would really recommend to others was Kana: Little Sister.
It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure the game does contain a few sex scenes (the title of the game hints at what these are about, so consider yourself warned), but they are very much on the backseat - the focus of the story is on the emotions of the protagonists, and I remember it as being very moving.
A game that’s shorter, lighter and not as tragic, yet works in a similar way is Crescendo - it’s a good game to try if you like the basic idea of telling a story in such fashion. If you like it, you ought to give Kana a try as well.
If you want to avoid ANY amount of adult-oriented content, a game that might be worth a look is Ever 17.
It’s at first a seemingly simple story about some young folks being left in a underwater amusement park that’s locked down due to an emergency, yet advances into a somewhat weird, almost philosophical story that runs on several levels not immediately recognizable.
It’s strange, but worth a look, imo.
rezaf
If the quality of higurashi no naku koro ni (english title “when they cry 1+2” is any indication of the quality of umineko no naku koro ni, then I would also add those two games to the recommended visual novel- list.
The RPS article talks briefly about the genre based on trailers of one specific game, otherwise it’s the same as this thread here. The Gamasutra article talks about the mechanics of storytelling. That’s not what I’m talking about. Maybe I’m not explaining it well, but for example, there was a very enjoyable, albeit, short article in PC Gamer several months ago about The Last Remnant, the JRPG by Square-Enix. JRPGs are pretty uncommon for PC games, at least in Western markets, so the writer didn’t know what to expect going in. The whole time he was playing it, he was miserable because the main character would pelvic thrust at the king, or schoolgirls would be kidnapped by slavers and the writer would be like, “of course they are”, and you just got the general impression that he wouldn’t mind if he never played a JRPG again.
There was a similar article on Joystiq or Kotaku - I forget which - where the writer, like most of his readers, wasn’t very familiar with real-time strategy games and even finds them intimidating, and Bruce Shelley was demoing the latest Age of Empires game or some such for him, and he’s supposed to write his impressions of it, but he’s not familiar with RTS and he tells Bruce Shelley just that, and there’s just an awkward silence between them and the PR guy until Bruce sighs and says, “Well, we know many of our customers are new to the RTS genre so now you can pause the game to give commands”. Bruce continues to demo the game, and the writer doesn’t know if he’s supposed to stop or ask questions or what, and he finally thanks Bruce for his time, and Bruce stops playing and is relieved to do so if I remember correctly.
So it’d be nice if there was an article in that vein about visual novels where maybe the writer doesn’t know what to expect, or maybe he thought it was like JRPGs without the monotonous gameplay aspects, or maybe he found the whole idea of it daft and it confirmed his suspicions that they were all weird porn games or whatever. Not an overview of the genre or about specific games, but more like, “I heard about this thing and thought you readers might be interested.”
That makes a lot more sense. I was wondering what the fuck sort of novel would take longer read than ASOIAF, Malazan, and Wheel of Time combined.
-Jrpgs are significantly less popular in the west.
-Anime style games are significantly less popular in the west.
-“old school” rpgs that rely on story and character depth are nearly dead in the west.
-Visual novels are a combination of all three of those unpopular things. It is no surprise that something that is very niche in the west is not given much screen time.
Actually, my diagnosis about what makes up a Visual Novel would be a tad different.
For example, if you think about it for a while, what are the parts that elevate Mass Effect 2 from being a mediocre corridor shooter?
Its the recruiting of individuals (which makes up the vast majority of ME2’s playing time) and the interaction with them (which unfortunately ends up being very shortish in ME2), the building of a friendship of sorts with some of them and, if you’re so inclined, the romance with one of them.
All of this could be recreated in a Visual Novel styled game.
The same holds true for other Bioware (or otherwise similar) games as well - Dragon Age for example.
In fact, if these games’ storylines were recreated as visual novels, your decisions would actually have a impact to the progression of the story, and the world would possibly end up being different alltogether
Heh, I’m almost tempted to download RenPy and actually turn a Bioware game into a visual novel. :p
rezaf
Add localization cost and effort on top of that and it makes it even worse. Unfortunately, because of the way text and VO overlap as pointed out up thread, doing a non-VOed release is not really an option. You can’t add subtitles when there are separate occurrences happening in text.
I’ve looked seriously at localizing these and it’s incredibly complicated for that reason. Much harder than a Phoenix Wright (I worked on the first of those).
I was wondering what could happen if someone took something like the Twilight trilogy and turned it to a Visual Novel.
Imagine it done from the perspective of Bella, who through the story goes into the love triangle and has to decide which boyfriend to pick, with fully branching story. Romance + mystery + suspense.
It would be a license to print money. I wonder why in Japan VNs are mostly aimed at boys.
Interesting fact - although it’s true that most VNs are aimed at men, some are specifically marketed to women. The main character is a woman, she is inexplicably popular with a huge number of attractive men, the men run the gamut of romantic stereotypes (the nice guy, the bad boy, the popular one, etc.), she ends up in trouble and the man-of-the-hour zooms in riding a white horse to save her - it’s all there. Visual novels have equal-opportunity pandering!
Somewhere in the world, there is a Gender Studies major/Asian Studies minor grad student who does nothing all day long but write little treatises on how the novels for women are different from the ones for men. I just know it.
It’s true that the medium seems like it would really lend itself to being made for women. After all, lots of VNs have complicated melodrama, extended characterization, and torrid love triangles - you’d think they would fit right in next to those bodice-ripping romance novels at your bookseller. Plus, the branching storyline lets you make your shipping official by playing matchmaker and choosing who ends up together. I think the genre hasn’t gone that way mostly because of inertia; visual novels started as explicit material aimed at men, and it’s only relatively recently that anyone realized you could take out the naughty pictures and still have something cool. (Or that women can like naughty pictures too, as long as they’re the right kind of pictures.)
That is not true. The medium started long before all the adult visual novels took off in the mid-nineties. Kamaitachi no Yoru, a horror/sci-fi story made by the same guys who did Shiren the Wanderer, is one of the earliest examples.
Anyway, there are tons of female oriented visual novels out there. Here’s a pretty mainstream one :
http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/01/21/nintendo_romance_novels/
I played through Baldr Force .EXE ages ago, and was really impressed by the narrative structure. The story has, as I recall, six major paths you can take. Each one overlaps with the others, and gives a different perspective on the overall story. In one path, you help fight off a terrorist attack on a military base; in another path, you’re fighting with the terrorists in the same attack.
It was a really interesting piece of storytelling.
I also found a japanese site with the length of the original japanese scripts: http://notazsite.hp.infoseek.co.jp/main/soft/size.html
We have:
Fate/Stay Night: 4.29
Clannad: 3.91
Umineko is not listed but considering the previous game it may end up with 6/7 (and that’s 1+ million words in english)
Hmm, guess I was wrong. I think I was recalling a Japanese developer who said that reduced focus on adult content became a trend in some parts around the turn of the century. Maybe that was more about what was popular/lucrative at different times than about what was first.
Damien: Baldr Sky, the most recent in the series, has the same thing going, so if you liked .EXE you’d probably like Sky. There’s a point in the game where at least four different factions meet in a giant melee around an underground base with a nuclear reactor, and depending on the route you might be attacking the base to blow up the reactor, inside the base and trying to escape, or sneaking into the base to defuse the sabotage someone else did to the reactor.
Maybe the most interesting part of Baldr Sky is that the main character is an amnesiac. Of course, an amnesiac main character who forces everyone to explain the plot to him (and thence also explain to the audience) is a terrible cliché, but Baldr Sky uses the amnesia for something much more interesting - the main character Kou has flashbacks to happier times before he became a freelance mercenary. Not only do they fill in the backstory, they also give you another interlocking narrative, because Kou has different flashbacks on different story routes. In addition to seeing the battles and events from different perspectives based on who Kou ends up fighting with, you also build up a changing view of what happened in the past before the whole shebang started, and Kou himself is a different character on routes where he remembers all the bad shit that made him throw away respectable living and turn into a hired gun. The narrative gets a HUGE amount of mileage from moving between the past and the present, the real world and the virtual, one story route and another, etc.
Ah, but that’s in megabytes. Not sure how useful this is (and how you’re converting this to words in English) though since blank spaces also take up a fair amount of space and many visual novel game scripts actually duplicate a fair amount of text in when doing the branching story paths (depending on their game engine) an actual play through will be much less than what you’d expect given the file sizes.
Are there Baldr-whatever fan translations? Because hearing how cool they are doesn’t much help us non-Japanese readers otherwise.