Visual Novels Aren’t A Joke – This Week in Anime

Now that the Type-Moon‘s visual novels have a new lease on life in English, Lucas and Steve look at other great entries in the medium. Visual novels aren’t just April Fool’s jokes!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Fate, Fate/stay night, Fate/stay night Réalta Nua, Fate/Grand Order, Fate/Hollow Ataraxia, Tsukihime, Witch on the Holy Night, Silent Hill, Silent Hill f, Tokimeki Memorial, Slay The Princess, Higurashi, Danganronpa, Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, PARANORMASIGHT: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, We Know the Devil, Heaven Will Be Mine, Analogue: A Hate Story, Ladykiller in a Bind, Class of 09, and Zero Escape/Nonary Games are available on Steam.

Steve

Yeah, I guess it’s about time we dug into that. I suppose this was inevitable. One might even call it our Fate/stay night.



Which, incidentally, now has an official English translation available for all on Steam and other platforms. I genuinely thought I’d never see the day.

Huh, you know, I’ve always used “play” as the verb for engaging with visual novels, but “read” is probably more appropriate, depending on the title.



Regardless, there’s never been a better time for me to finally learn about Fate characters that I can recognize at a glance thanks to the internet but otherwise know nothing about. This franchise feels like one of the last big anime/gaming IP holdouts that never got a fair shake in the West, and it’s super cool that visual novels are finally big enough here for the localization effort to be worthwhile!

You could even argue the market has been here for a while. And much like the anime scene, its early days were reliant on bootlegs, piracy, and fan legwork. I remember setting my Windows locale to Japan to get certain games working correctly. It was, quite literally, the Wild West, but it was a nexus built around the passion of a small, fervent group of VN aficionados.

Man, it upsets me that VNs are still a punchline to a lot of people. And I’m saying that as someone whose introduction to VNs was largely through punchlines. In the mid-2000s, my first exposure to Fate, Key, Higurashi, and the like came from the memes that got filtered through the crosstalk from Japanese anime nerds to American anime nerds. I didn’t know who this was or why this picture was funny, but it was one of many mysterious and enticing portals into the medium at the time.

Hey, I think that image is intrinsically hilarious, but you make a strong overall point. VNs were never huge in the West, and as mainstream gaming studios and players placed a growing focus on “realism,” this quietly influential genre was written off before it even got its chance in the limelight.

Yeah, it was also a very unambiguously nerdy thing to be into. Even more so than anime. It’s also more disreputable than anime because many of them did contain dating sim elements and/or graphic sex scenes, as was the style at the time. And no matter how much you could talk up the sprawling stories or innovative structural designs, merely the adjacency to porn was enough to turn some people entirely off VNs.

My rule of thumb is that if it feels appropriate for the themes, topic, and message of the story, the more explicit the material, the merrier! It’s generally pretty easy to tell when sex scenes have been tacked onto a project just to draw attention from audiences that put much attention on that kind of media, and I tend to find those kinds of VNs tacky and poor examples of the genre.



To return to the VN, I opened this convo with, Slay the Princess is GUSHING with sexual and pseudo-sexual situations and uses all of them to incredible effect!

You could even argue that the format is uniquely suited to that kind of intimacy! This is why it’s funny that the popular perception of VNs in the English scene has more or less bifurcated. You’ve still got people who think they’re porno trash (in a derogatory sense). But now you’ve also got people who think VNs only have value as long as they’re being “subversive.”

Same, and that’s why, despite my transparent griping about it just before, I still have yet to play Doki Doki Literature Club. I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine game, but upon its release, it was kinda maddening to see all this praise directed at its “deconstruction” of visual novel tropes. I mean, a cute story turning evil is practically a cliche in the medium, yet fans and critics suddenly declared DDLC to be the hallowed One Good One. A single Higurashi chapter would melt their brains.



But I’d rather not dwell on the bad. There’s plenty of good in the English scene. In fact, the other thing that prompted this column was the surprise addition of Katawa Shoujo to the Steam store. Yet another development I never would have predicted.

Wow, even on a surface level, Katawa Shoujo feels like a product of the 2000s anime fan community. I’m hesitant to check out anything with channel origins, but this seems like a fascinating piece of media to experience and critically examine.

With the caveat that I read it 12 years ago, I think it earned its reputation as a legitimately great OELVN and not just “the one 4chan wrote.” The artists and writers who worked together on it put in a hell of a lot of love and polish, and the character writing is complex and sensitive. I mean, you’re also right—it is a product of that community, but I think that origin behooves it. Katawa Shoujo feels right in step with the popular VNs of the time, and I respect it for respecting its elders. It doesn’t shy away from sex scenes either (though, per usual, you have to download a separate patch for them on this release because Steam is run by hypocrites).

That does suck, but by the same turn, it’s a little encouraging to consider that, since we have so many visual novels to choose from now, some gems can go hidden. Back in my day, we were all waiting with bated breath for the next Danganronpa update to drop on Something Awful. Now, Kazutaka Kodaka is a name used to market his new games. Times sure have changed.



I’m also encouraged by the growth of the original English language visual novel scene in the past decade—lots of interesting voices doing cool and deeply personal stuff with the medium. Two of my favorites come from Worst Girls Games, namely We Know the Devil and Heaven Will Be Mine. If you like coming-of-age horror and/or Gundam for freaks, I can’t recommend them enough.

Haha, the fact that there are so many professionally produced Western visual novels is, in and of itself, proof that the times have changed!



For my money, Class of 09 is one of the best in that lot. To keep it brief, the series is about how much it sucks to be a teenage girl in post-9/11 America. I actually interviewed the creator of these games over on ButWhyTho, and folks should look that up if they want to learn more about the mentality and process that went into them.

That’s close enough to my graduating year to pique my interest. I’m also a big fan of Christine Love’s stuff. She delves into engaging sci-fi questions and mysteries with Analogue: A Hate Story, and later, she puts together a lot of good and sexy fun with Ladykiller in a Bind. Or if you want more information, I’ll refer you to its full title, My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind!! Kinda says it all on the tin there.

Ugh, Christine Love’s games have been on my backlog for FOREVER!!! I know I’d love her work and really need to make the time to play them.



I also have to shout out the Zero Escape/Nonary games. They’re by Kōtarō Uchikoshi (who, by all accounts, is a genuinely cool, progressive, and socially-minded dude) and have some of the most engaging writing you’ll ever experience in the gaming medium.

They marry the visual novel and adventure game formats so adeptly. I think the popularity of those and the Danganronpa series also helped broaden people’s perspectives of what VNs could do mechanically. However, there’s nothing wrong with the basics, either. Higurashi has virtually no player input, and it remains one of my favorite and most powerful VN experiences ever. The game is much richer than any of its anime adaptations. It’s also on Steam, frequently on sale, and thanks to fan patches, you can even play with the superior original sprites.