This is long or short?

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AoiMF
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This is long or short?

#1 Post by AoiMF »

I wrote a story with 70k words. Usually people ask me if this visual novel is long or short. What should I give them?

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parttimestorier
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Re: This is long or short?

#2 Post by parttimestorier »

In my experience, a lot of people measure the length of visual novels in terms of how long it would take to read them. I just googled average reading speed and the first result tells me it's about 200-300 words per minute, so 12k-18k words in an hour, which would make a 70k word story roughly 4-6 hours long for most people I think - you could also get some more accurate results on that by asking your beta testers to time how long it takes them. That's fairly short if you compare it to Japanese visual novels - some of the most popular of which can take upwards of 40-50 hours - but you could probably call it at least medium-length if you're comparing it to English visual novels, which tend to trend more toward the shorter side.
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Re: This is long or short?

#3 Post by AoiMF »

Thank you!

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Re: This is long or short?

#4 Post by alexei »

10.000 words in a visual novel take about 40 to 60 min to read.

Note that depending on the routes, it might take you less time to finish a VN.

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Re: This is long or short?

#5 Post by nerupuff »

Following 10,000 words per hour of reading speed, you might have 7 hours worth of total play time. If you have branching routes, then it may take shorter than 7 hours to complete 1 route for your VN.

Like what parttimestorier said, there's a difference in length comparison between JVN vs EVN, with the latter usually having much shorter game time. For vndb categories re: VN length, here are some examples!
  • Very short (<2 hours)
  • Short (2-10 hours)
  • Medium (10-30 hours)
  • Long (30-50 hours)
  • Very long (>50 hours)
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