Visual Novel USA

[Shii]

I've just launched a personal page. Eventually, I plan to have reviews of all the visual novel games in English! Oh, yes I do! Okay, maybe not. Well, most of them okay?

Now, renai.us is archiving all the romance games. This website is going to review visual novel games. Right now, there's a lot of overlap, but I'm hoping there'll be less in the future.

Here's the site as it stands today; I'll be setting up reviews over the next weeks.
... this site is gone now, my host got tired of me.

If you see any games I missed, or mistakes I made, please let me know! orz

[Megaman Z]

you know, to be correct, you should say Tales of Lemma 2 is "STILL FROZEN AT 72%" as it's status. maybe that'll wake Blue lemma up. (considering it's about to be a full year late...)

[chronoluminaire]

Interesting site! Two things:

* Where did the "visual story" phrase come from? Is it something you made up yourself? I've not encountered it before. The standard term is visual novel, which does not carry any suggestion of being as long as a novel. It may be best to try to stick to established terminology, even if you're avoiding Japanese words.

* You may want to look at ATP Projects' fairly comprehensive English bishoujo game encyclopaedia.

[Shii]

Where did the "visual story" phrase come from? Is it something you made up yourself?

It popped into my head. Thanks for pointing this out, I'm glad you did before I formally launched the site.

edit: Yeah, I agree it sounds nice, but I'm more concerned with not confusing people Done now.

edit2: ATP Projects' page is so helpful, and yet so useless! What led them to not provide any links for the games they name?

[mikey]

Nice effort! I'm looking forward ^_^

Personally I thought Visual Story was a nice name for a change, although Chronoluminaire is right about the terminology, you can also take a look here >> http://www.renaigames.com/dev_mikey2.html

As for my encyclopedia, it's updated even more, but currently I don't have access to my page, so I can't put up the newer version - I found some more projects (not full games really). So if you need some of their webpages I'll gladly help, some of them are hard to find.

[Guest]

The standard term is visual novel, which does not carry any suggestion of being as long as a novel.

Is it really? Some of the Megatokyo regulars get annoyed by what they perceive as a misuse of the "visual novel" label (and ironically, Megatokyo staff popularized its alleged misuse).

IIRC, "visual novel" is supposed to be one company's designation for its own line of games (like how Chunsoft calls its adventures "Sound Novels"). However, the standard genre name is actually ADV (short for adventure), which is rather vague, esp. for Westerners who might be accustomed to graphic adventures of a different sort (King's Quest, etc.).

[rioka]

Misuse of visual novel? In what way? I would understand a misuse issue if someone was trying to pass SimGirl for a Visual Novel but in what way is it off in this threads context?

Anyways, according to the MegaTokyo Ren'ai Forum FAQ page, this is what they have to say:

"Visual Novels refers more to a specific sort of gameplay, rather than content. Visual Novels are very heavily text-based, and often the story is told with still images and text. Much like interactive fiction games, you will also get to make choices that impact the flow of the story.
For example: Kanon, Air: http://key.visualarts.gr.jp/ (contains adult content)
For example: Sense Off: http://otherwise.product.co.jp/ (contains adult content)"

[Blue Lemma]

you know, to be correct, you should say Tales of Lemma 2 is "STILL FROZEN AT 72%" as it's status. maybe that'll wake Blue lemma up. (considering it's about to be a full year late...)

Maybe it'd be best not to even include ToL 2 for now >_< It's around... but it will probably be getting done in the far future. Other stuff will come out before that.

[Guest]

What I mean is that outside of Western fandom, Visual Novel isn't a genre designation of any sort. It's a Leaf/Aqua Plus label, similar to how Choose Your Own Adventure was a Random House line. For instance, you won't find any other game maker using the same designation, nor is it even commonly used to classify that style of game (unlike CYOA. After all, Leaf wasn't the first to popularize the formula). By convention, the genre is simply "Adventure" (ADV for short) or sometimes "Love Adventure". Key classifies its games under the latter.

For various reasons (maybe to avoid confusion or to draw a distinction between different types of adventures), we've borrowed the Visual Novel term and have adopted it to describe any game that's structured in a similar way. This is actually how I'd prefer it. VN is considerably more descriptive than just ADV. However, some purists will argue that we're stealing Leaf's label or are inventing a genre name that doesn't exist in Japan.

[Shii]

However, some purists will argue that we're stealing Leaf's label or are inventing a genre name that doesn't exist in Japan.

Well, "bishoujo" is not a genre in Japan either, and nobody's complaining about that. I think the English-language idea of a "visual novel" was popularized by the Megatokyo forum, so if I'm not going to link to them on my website because they're dead and overmoderated, I should at least pay a bit of homage to the original visual novel discussion forum. Also, you're right in guessing that ADV is a worthless name for a genre in the U.S.

I put up reviews for The Garden Society and Hourglass of Summer, that sort of typify what the reviews will look like.

[Grey]

Just a note, both Heikou and Kasuka should both have the same requirements, and I only know them to run natively on Windows XP and Windows 9X.

[mikey]

I think the English-language idea of a "visual novel" was popularized by the Megatokyo forum, so if I'm not going to link to them on my website because they're dead and overmoderated, I should at least pay a bit of homage to the original visual novel discussion forum. .

^_^

Well, I tried to find a reasonable way of describing the games in that article I mentioned above. Also, it's not uncommon to use the term "visual novel" for manga. Ever heard of that? I did, many times. Or for a comic book in general, "graphic novel". And to tell the tuth that is maybe the more logical designation. After all, there is the photonovel, so a "graphic/visual novel" is logical. Before I knew about MT we described Season of the sakura by saying it's a "text adventure". With graphics. Whatever. It's an ongoing debate...

[Herzeleid]

Oh look, it's Shii.
How you been man?

[Shii]

Oh look, it's Shii.
How you been man?

Pretty productive, as you can see.

[Herzeleid]

Nice to see you're not hung up on being permabanned, trying to get people to buy accounts and such

The site is looking good, I had been hearing that Hourglass of Summer was going to be one of the best games ever before it's release, looks like it turned out to be shit.