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Obviously romance is a big genre,but do any other genres get any attention? I would love to make a fantasy/quest puzzle game. Even small things like where you choose to eat would really matter. Is this appealing? What are your opinions? (really vague idea it was just to get the idea across)

I can't really say for sure what's popular, but speaking for myself, food VNs are pretty cool. You could even say I have a big appetite for them.

Culinary Visual Novels with restaurant/cafe settings are pretty popular, i.e. RisAmo, and Culina: Hands in the Kitchen.

I'd like more VNs about food served up, please. >.>b The genre could expand its menu a tad.

Mad_Scientist wrote:I can't really say for sure what's popular, but speaking for myself, food VNs are pretty cool. You could even say I have a big appetite for them.

Wtf you're sense of humour is so not funny it made me laugh

I think you should just do what you want to do and then do it well.

If people only ever did what they perceived to be already popular, we would never have innovation.

trooper6 wrote:I think you should just do what you want to do and then do it well.

If people only ever did what they perceived to be already popular, we would never have innovation.

This. Can I use that as my signature lmao

I like them with lots of drama. Particularly at the end of the story. I'm a drama pervert.

I like that feeling of emptiness left after a very sad game. I think about it many days after, it becomes a part of me.

I also love cliffhangers. A lot of classics offers that : Ever17, Remember11, Higurashi, Umineko... The VN format seems to be really effective when it comes to cliffhangers.

I think puzzle games are starting to get a bit more popular *points to Exogensis: Perils of rebirth and Y;N*

Mad_Scientist wrote:I can't really say for sure what's popular, but speaking for myself, food VNs are pretty cool. You could even say I have a big appetite for them.

That is the best pun I have ever seen

Indeed, VNs with puzzles are popular! Two of my friends discovered the genre with 999 on DS, which is more like a point and click, but with a lot of text and a VN presentation. And the scenarist worked for KID in the past, too.

While not all strictly VNs, I think you could actually make the case that puzzle/quest games are MORE popular in the West than romance titles... off the top of my head, Phoenix Wright, Professor Layton, 999, Hotel Dusk, several Telltale Studios games, Tim Schafer's point-and-click games (and really all of those 90s adventure games)...

Take this with a grain of salt--I don't play romances, so I may be underestimating how popular they are. But my guess based on how much coverage they get online would be that most of the above-mentioned titles have much larger English-language audiences than even a very popular romance VN.

That said, I think trooper6 pretty much summed it up with:

I think you should just do what you want to do and then do it well.

Popular genres:

- Fantasy
- Sci-fi
- Mystery/Puzzle
- Horror
- Romance
- Slice of Life (especially set at a school)
- Parody
- Fanwork
- Adult (this is a genre right?)
- Tragic

In visual novels I haven't seen many comedies for some reason, seems like it could be interesting, and rarely any focused exclusively on a subject like for example spelling contests, soccer teams etc. Meshing genres with romance is also very common. Also don't see a lot of the art is incomprehensible types, really delineated or unstructured narratives, poetry, dream journals, historical logs, teaching applications... (The boundaries truly are endless.) There are also not many vns that focus on very young or very old characters. Not a lot of army focused stuff, not any "realistic" pirate stuff that isn't romance as far as I can see. No politics, law centric vns. Not much that's just pictures. Something in a made up language, really abstract stuff. (I know, who would play it?) The software could also be used for photo-tours of real life locations... or made up ones, where there could be a hidden narrative or something.

Anyway, the most frequently seen and thus I believe popular genres are listed above. The stuff I mentioned isn't seen as much but I think there are definitely people who'd be interested in successfully managing an army, playing a game about making model figures, seeing an old woman reflecting back on her life etc. Stuff like that might not be as popular but it enriches the vn community to have a variety of material and formats available. Whether you make something popular or unpopular it all contributes to building a larger library of OELVN and the conventional/unconventional titles nested within.

Yay for visual novels! (Or something, I guess... *slinks away*)

Genre is really beside the point, ALL genres have their fans. What makes games popular is that they are /interesting/. They offer something engaging and unique to the player and they do it /well/. If you look at all the popular games, the ones that are brought up time and time again as a must try, the common thread is they have something to offer that isn't common to other games. Hatoful Boyfriend is an excellent example of this. These games know their core engagement and they present it brilliantly so the audience can not ignore it.

I want to add something on to this very thoughtful post.

What visual novel's get more attention? What the original questions...my response would be...attention from whom?

There are lots of different communities and different communities will give attention to different games.

I don't hang out in otome circles, so I don't actually know what gets attention there.
I don't hang out in circles that are about english translation of Japanese VNs or Japanese VNs in general so I don't know what gets attention there.
I tend to hang out in art game circles and feminist gaming circles and intellectual circles...so what genres get most attention?
Usually not romance. But arty/intellectual/feminist games.

So I had heard of Digital: A Love Story, long before I ever heard of Kawata Shoujo. I had heard of Cave Cave Deus Videt before I had heard of Clannad.

I read theborderhouse blog and Rock, Paper, Shotgun--and let me tell you...Cinders was getting lots of attention there. Some of the Romance VNs that you say are very popular (and I'm sure they are), are not so much in those other circles.

So...I think it is important to recognize that VNs don't all have one audience. There are overlapping audiences. And while I'm certainly a VN gamer and enthusiast, I am not the audience for moe romance games with tsundere characters.

If you think about novels for a second, there are many different genres and if you write for them you think about the specific audience you want to target. I also read an article that suggested you write for the genre that you actually would like to read from.

I believe visual novels even go further than this because you can include various game-play elements plus there's the visual style that different audiences may prefer.

So I'd recommend making the kind of visual novel that you yourself would like to play.

As to what VNs get more attention, look in the completed games sections for any posts that have over 1000 views AND the number of replies is about 10% (or more) of the number of views.