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activi t

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  1. Like
    activi t got a reaction from Naoe in What is the appeal of visual novels?   
    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!
     
  2. Like
    activi t got a reaction from Narcosis in What is the appeal of visual novels?   
    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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