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activi t

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  1. Okay, so the consensus here seems to be that the combination of art, music, writing, and interactivity and the overall experience you get from that is what resonates with VN readers and distracts from the simplicity in some if the elements when examined alone. I'm not entirely convinced narrative in visual novels shouldn't be compared to narrative in other media as I feel like much of the basics in "regular" novel writing (and with the most rudimentary parts, any storytelling, really) is indistinguishable from that in visual novels. Or maybe that sterile writing does actually work in this medium, as juss100 claimed? It's a bit hard to tell as I haven't read any with exceptionally good prose yet. However, seems like I just couldn't grasp that overall feeling visual novels are supposed to convey, so maybe it simply isn't a medium for me.
  2. Hello again. I'd like to apologize for (as has already been called out) disappearing from my very own thread without responding to any of you. This wasn't my intention, but I got really caught up with a couple of RL issues. The thread would probably have been more fruitful if I had posted it at a different time (like now), but that can't be helped. I can't respond to every single response individually, but I can assure you that I've read them all and taken them into consideration. So I'll be responding to a couple of recurring points in this thread. First of all, it does seem like I delved into this medium with the wrong mindset. There is indeed nothing wrong with visual novels being an entertainment medium first and foremost. I guess they could be compared to something like young adult literature or a popcorn movie? It's perfectly fine to enjoy that, and I might have been looking at this from the wrong angle. I'll try out Saya no Uta and these NVL recommendations, so thanks for those. The integration of audiovisual aspects was something where people disagreed with me. After thinking over it for a while, the audial isn't necessarily as bad as I initially believed. Certain emotions being connected with a specific soundtrack can do wonders in setting the mood, and this seems to be exploited well enough. I'm still not convinced with the visuals, though. Art can be used to express concepts which can't be accurately described by writing, but I don't think it accomplishes this goal in the VNs I tried. The visual aspects have not been connected to the overall story on a meaningful way, nor expanded it's presentation beyond what words could describe. Visuals have simply been used as lackluster substitutes for more imaginative prose, which leads me to the next point where people wanted more clarification: The writing is lazy. These visual novels constantly broke the "show, don't tell" rule, which is perhaps the most basic of all writing advice. It's not enough to tell the reader what is going on, but you should also make the reader feel and get immersed into it to give them reason to care about any of it at all. Elementary example: Bishoujo-chan looked tired. vs. Bishoujo-chan collapsed on the bed and I could see dark circles under her eyes. When preset sprites or backgrounds aren't enough to describe the situation, sentences like the first one need more unpacking to make the reader experience the world themselves, rather than the writer acting as an interpreter for it.This also manifests for instance in the overuse of adverbs. There isn't anything inherently wrong with adverbs but they were often used in the wrong way, to avoid writing things more interestingly and picking the reader's brain. Simply put, the writing wasn't engaging enough. As writing is the meat of visual novels, it makes the overall experience quite dull. Another aspect which was brought up was the integration of choices in shaping the outcome of the story. I'm a bit conflicted with this issue, as I never saw it as a big selling point of visual novels. It seems that the choices are mostly restricted to just a couple of important ones, which determine which route you'll end up in and another one for how the route will end. But this is a bit tricky as I'm not sure how much this could be improved without making it overly complicated and impossible to work with. Overall I just don't think player choices were such a big aspect of any of the visual novels I tried nor anything that would draw me in, though I do admit that the use of a non-linear narrative worked quite well particularly in Fate/Stay Night. Apologies for butchering the conversation, but I'll be able to respond accurately from now on.
  3. Hey, I want to start of by paraphrasing that my intention is not to mock your hobby or to stir the pot in a niche discussion board, I've come here simply to understand more about visual novels as a medium and why people enjoy them. So I'm a longtime albeit casual anime fan and after watching the White Allbum 2 anime adaptation, decided to check out what these so-called visual novels were. My prejudices of VNs being little more than otaku fap material were rebutted by this anime, and after some googling and Wikipedia-research, I though that VNs sounded quite cool and I might actually enjoy them. I decided to give visual novels a shot. I actually didn't begin my journey with Katawa Shoujo, I thought trying an "original" Japanese visual novel would be more appropriate as it might give a better representation of the medium. I started off with Kanon and soon after that read Fate/stay night and Grisaia no Kajitsu, and was thoroughly disappointed. My main gripe was the writing. It was pretty obvious from the get-go that these stories were written by amateurs, and I found the writing no better than in some of those trashy harem light novels I tried before. The pacing was awful and the plot dragged out way too much. For instance, you don't need rows upon rows of mind-numbing dialogue to flesh out the personality of your characters or have the reader develop a connection with them, that is simply bad writing. Not to mention that the dialogue in these situations often felt forced and unnatural. The VNs I read lacked any sort of literary merit or narrative quality, from start to finish there was no subtext to anything of what I read. Everything was presented to the reader carefully arranged on a platter with little room left for individual interpretation. I felt like your average Hollywood flick or live-action TV series has more depth to it than the stories and their presentation in visual novels. When written text is the center of the medium, lacking any stand-alone narrative quality is a huge problem. I felt like the visuals and music simply encouraged this lackluster writing, but didn't add enough substance compensate of it. When an emotional scene hits, you don't need to use any fancy prose when you can rely on a recycled song and change the facial expression of your sprites, right? These audiovisual characteristics weren't developed well enough in my opinion. It's just some static background images on top of which you throw a sprite with a couple of different poses and facial expressions. Done. It felt like the visual, the audial, and the written parts were developed completely separately from each other with little connection to the overarching story which would incorporate all three, and at the end just mashed together with all departments expecting the other one to do all the hard work to capture the essence of the moment. I realize I've only read very few visual novels, but considering that these seem to be some of the most highly-acclaimed ones out there (at least among the translated ones) and that all three of them exhibited the same flaws, I believe it would be safe to assume these flaws were rampant in the medium as a whole. Again, I don't want to offend anyone with this, these are simply my personal experiences and observations with visual novels and why I didn't find them enjoyable. I ventured to visual novels with a positive attitude, I believed I would find enjoyment in them. I might have looked at things the wrong way or my analysis may simply be completely off the track, which is why I decided to post this here to hear the opinions of more experienced VN enthusiasts, and I'm ready to give visual novels another chance. But from what I've seen so far, I don't know why anyone would find this medium even remotely interesting. If you enjoy reading, why not read books which handle the writing much better and more imaginatively? If you like the tropes or audiovisual characteristics, why not watch anime or read manga which handle those aspects way better? I hope we can have a constructive discussion on the ideas presented here and the nature of visual novels as a medium. Cheers!
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