What are VNs to you?

[Clephas]

Visual novels mean different things to different people.  For some they are a source of plots that anime writers can't afford to try (due to corporate restrictions), for others they are a way to satisfy gratuitous moe lust, and for yet others they are simply yet another excuse to fap.  What are visual novels to you?

 

In my case, VNs were an epiphany, originally.  In my mind, no medium so effectively appeals to the mind through the written word, visual input, and aural input as well.  The medium has a potential for storytelling that far surpasses any existing medium, for those who prefer to use their imagination but also want an experience (as opposed to books, where the reader's imagination is the greater part of the experience). 

 

Later, I grew to appreciate how this niche medium was free - to an extent - from the corruption of excessive corporate intervention.  This was because production costs for a medium-quality (visual and audio) are far lower than the costs of a normal video game's development.   This also makes indie production cheaper and easier. 

 

Of course, the sheer number of moege and nukige out there show the ubiquitous presence of the corporate world's overpowering influence even here, but I've experienced stories from VNs that would never have survived the scrutiny an anime or a traditional video game story undergoe from their corporate slave masters.  This, in itself, proves the value of the medium, despite the glut of low-quality moege and nukige out there. 

[Clephas]

lol... they are talking about Western games, and they are full of BS.  If anything, game stories have gotten progressively crappier in the last four to five years.  If you are talking about decent plots in Western games, the Mass Effect trilogy is an example of godliness... and there are plenty of jrpgs pre-2006 that had great stories (even if they later became tropes and cliches).  Anyone who says this is the age of 'video games with story' hasn't been paying attention for the past seventeen years or so... 

 

Edit:  The fact that most of the ideas from the Last of Us were stolen from a certain post-apocalyptic book series that I won't name here is so bloody obvious that I have to laugh when people say the story is unique. 

[Guest madoka12345]

Something to ease my depression.

[nohman]

To keep it simple: entertainment.

 

They're stories told a specific way, with everything that entails.

[Flutterz]

To me VNs are actually all 3 things you've listed. I like a good story and VNs can deliver them more effectively than books because they also have images and sounds, but not to the extent that your imagination is completely unnecessary, like movies. They can also be a great way to get a dose of moe, and some VNs like SonoHana are straight up fap material, which also has its uses. 

[BookwormOtaku]

Alot of what the OP listed applies to me too (will say that I'm not as averse to nukige, especially the rare gems you come across like the Kyonyuu Fantasy series) though I admit one reason I got into visual novels is because the route idea reminded me of the choose your own adventure books (the main series I read/played was Endless Quest and Lone Wolf) that I read/played alot of as a kid (and still do) so to me VNs are also kind of like an evolved cousin to those books I enjoyed.

[Zakamutt]

I find media where I cannot control the pace of advancement of information kind of unattractive and boring after a while - this is why I only do the occasional anime binge of 5 episodes or so and then take a month-long break or whatever. I used to be a bookworm, but, well, VNs are just better at doing what books aim to do. A soundtrack adds so much so do visuals when it comes to sprites to be honest.

[HackaFreak]

Desirable females.


Well that's lame.  Elaboration. <-also lame why am i talking like that


But, yeah.  I used to find anything that wasn't love boring and uninteresting.  I still do, but nowadays I tend to be horribly pessimistic and cynical.  Nothing's quite as good as a fictional character that can simply be stated as having certain personality traits.  Sure, I enjoy a good story every now and then. But if there's no pretty girls then I tend to lose interest.  VNs have pretty girls.

[Forythos]

Interesting question, I've been thinking about it for a bit and I think part of it is that I've always enjoyed reading for as long as I can remember, and also have always enjoyed video games, including ye-olde text adventure games from the west.  The dating-sim/moege aspect can sometimes also have some influence, depending on my mood, I've always been a sucker for these type of games where you choose your favorite girl and try to have a romance with her, but I also enjoy reading deeper stories that make me think about life and probably wouldn't have the same impact in other mediums.  I'm the type who can stop on a line to think about it for a while, so it usualy takes me forever to finish any VN.

 

I like your point about corporate influence on video games though.  It makes a lot of sense to me and probably affected my liking of the medium without me realizing it.  It would also explain why I find myself interested in less and less console titles as years go by. (At least, Falcom, Atlus and a few others are still holding to flame.)

[Clephas]

Corporate influence - in particular, the idea of 'mainstream appeal' - is the greatest threat to good stories.  I state this as a fact rather than a simple opinion.  Efforts to appeal to wider and wider audiences have a bad habit of creating stories that have a disturbing degree of similarity (most moege are exactly like all other moege, as are the various sub-genres of nukige). 

 

If you want an example of this influence in the regular video game industry, Final Fantasy is a rather obvious one.  Originally, FF was a major series in a niche genre that pandered to its fanbase unashamedly... but when jrpgs showed a possibility of becoming part of the mainstream, they immediately acted to 'widen its appeal', resulting in Final Fantasy X, which, while and admittedly awesome game, also was the game that killed the traditional 'overworld map' and introduced 'on the rails' environments.  To be blunt, the element of world exploration was lost from most jrpgs after that, because it was found to be much easier to blur things on geography and pass the players through a tunnel that looked like a wide-open field.  By the time Final Fantasy XII came out, all traces of creativity had been eliminated from the story-writing, leaving a rather bland narrative and a rather pathetic reliance on 'cutting edge visuals' and voice-acting to cover it up.

 

For anime... so many examples, but if I had to pick one that stands out as a 'standard' for predictable and bland story-writing... sorry, too many to name.  The existence of moeblob comes to mind, as do your standard 'love-comedy' anime... but you can see the effects of over-farming of the same ideas in the simple fact that we are lucky to see three decent anime series come out in a single year now.

 

That said, it is kind of funny that they spend so much time chasing that illusionary mainstream appeal, since all it is doing is making people want unique or niche products. 

[Darklord Rooke]

lol... they are talking about Western games, and they are full of BS.  If anything, game stories have gotten progressively crappier in the last four to five years.  If you are talking about decent plots in Western games, the Mass Effect trilogy is an example of godliness... and there are plenty of jrpgs pre-2006 that had great stories (even if they later became tropes and cliches).  Anyone who says this is the age of 'video games with story' hasn't been paying attention for the past seventeen years or so... 

 

Planescape Torment contains one of the greatest stories ever seen in video games (a fact universally acknowledged by everyone who has played the game)* and this was released over a decade ago. So it's definitely incorrect to say that 'The Last of us' was one of the first Western games to contain a meaningful story.

 

*This is a completely unbiased and factual statement made by Rooke, who is definitely not a Planescape fanboy.

[RusAnon]

I've became fan of the medium primarily due to lack of restrains and taboos in stories.

Saya no Uta managed to transgress pretty much every taboo of modern entertainment industry (and I don't mean purely moral stuff — this includes concept of "bad ends", which aren't just simple "game over" screens but deep stories which try to convey protag's feeling of despair to you), and I immediately started seeking more of that.

For most VN writers there's no editors or publishers above them who tell them what is acceptable and what isn't, they just write it the way they want.

[Katatsumuri]

They provide me with a (sometimes very sad) story. When I started reading VNs, I was at the brink of loosing interest in the story of games in general, due to the fact that I believed that the story of "todays" games had nowhere near the strength and power of the stories of older games, such as FF VI or Lufia II. Whenever some gaming magazine or person says that games such as "the last of us" are the first games which really pay attention to story, I mentally facepalm.

 

VNs provide (as Rusanon pointed out) a story that usually is very "unrestraind" and showing whatever the writer wanted to convey. In the west, whenever you make a game which has even a very little thing that alludes to, say, sexual things (Mass effect, anyone?) media will instantly make it into a huge deal. So it's the freedom that VNs have as a medium that is much of it's appeal to me.

[Bolverk]

I love vn's because it's a combination of media together with a book. The music, visuals and voice make the stories so much easier to get into and immerse myself in.

Also the stories and characters are often anime or manga like with a better and longer story. It fits me perfectly.

 

*Rant on*

Mainstream games are imo just getting worse all the time. This is especially said for bigger companies. (But also smaller ones) Multiple great video games series have been RUINED imo by making them "mainstream". Splinter Cell an awesome stealth game series. They even had put 1 year of planning into making it even more awesome open and such. I was realy looking forewards to that. But noooo, the big bosses on top didn't want that. So we instead of Splinter Cell: Conviction! Suddenly now you control a Bionic superman who can climp and run and shoot insanely fast. wtfffff.

 

Ghost recon. Awesome series with a long past. I liked the last games also GRAW 1 and 2. They were great imo. Easier to play but still good. Then, let's make it "mainstream". I raged when I saw the trailer first for the next title. Ghost recon: future soldier. omfhg, you can't be serious. I don't even know where to start on this one. It's just so much wrong....

 

Assasins creed, first game was very well done. Rough in the edges but interesting plot and world. It made you think and wonder about right and wrong, the creed etc. Long conversations with your master about retoric etc. It was truly something new. The next games in comperisation was like. He must die kill him. You say: "Okay". The last game that has come out is supposedly good, but... Yeah...

*Rant off*

[fleurdeliz24]

For me, VN's, at it's worst, tell you a story in different angles of perspective. At best, it transports you to another world where, while aware that you are not the one acting it out, you feel what the protagonist feels.

[Nosebleed]

Honestly i don't have a deep psychedelic emotional reason for what VNs are to me~

They are enjoyable ways to read a good story (when the story is good) and feel better since the 3D world is pretty crappy.

They keep my spirits up when i'm bored and i get cute girls in return.

But i see them as original and unique pieces of work, each of them is unique in story and so every novel deserves a chance. There's amazing stories in some VNs you don't forget and some mark you pretty deeply.

For me  VNs are simply that, a way to immerse into a fantasy world more deeply than i would with any other medium.

 

And then there's Nukiges which i will not elaborate on~

[Albedo]

 

By the time Final Fantasy XII came out, all traces of creativity had been eliminated from the story-writing, leaving a rather bland narrative and a rather pathetic reliance on 'cutting edge visuals' and voice-acting to cover it up.

 

Funny, FFXII was the Final Fantasy game that took the most risks with its story, and despite the forced inclusion of Vaan and Penelo, it shows; its plot is so far removed from the typical jrpg formula that it isn't funny. If it has any faults, I'd say its awful pacing and that perhaps it was expecting too much from its audience.

 

Oh, and Mass Effect is mediocre (except for 2, which was a pretty fun action movie on its own, even if its irrelevant to the larger plot) and Planescape:Torment is the shit.

 

For me, VNs are simply a form of entertainement where I can get kinds of stories that I can't get anywhere else. Sure, having graphics and sound is a plus, but most of the time the graphical aspect of VNs is underused, and they tend to fall back on description... which sorta defeats the point of a graphic medium, as anyone reading a 1970s Marvel Comic could tell you. Also, lots of times they do need editors to cut back on redundancy/purpleness or to fix glaring logic holes or pacing, but they don't have them because they'd rather spend the money on a cg of a loli eating a cake with her onii-chan. But still, I'd say that having unique stories make up for all of that.

[Clephas]

I think FFT took more risks... FFXII was born of an abortive attempt at imitating it because they were based in the same world.  The ideas and non-physical setting of the game were interesting, but the way they told the story and its progression varied from boring to absolutely senseless.

[Supah Kawaii Weeaboo]

A form of entertainment, rather than Serious Business. I've enjoyed a variety of VNs with different art styles, story types, gameplay types, format (PC versus console versus iOS), and so on. I believe that a good story or video game should transcend when, where, how, and why it was created.

Would I like to see even more variety and some convergence? Yes. It would be fascinating to experience more cross-culture products like Roseverte's games, more interactive stories which push the boundaries of what's expected, and more video games with clever narratives. But it's difficult to sell people on innovation. And for every famous freeware VN that's released, there's probably seven that go unnoticed, and seven that were never finished.

[Albedo]

I think FFT took more risks... FFXII was born of an abortive attempt at imitating it because they were based in the same world.  The ideas and non-physical setting of the game were interesting, but the way they told the story and its progression varied from boring to absolutely senseless.

 

Maybe, but FFT was not a numbered FF, and also was Matsuno being told to do Tactics Ogre with Chocobos, and he did, and it was great. But plot wise, it was a lot more obvious who you were supposed to root for in FFT than FFXII, except maybe for Delita.

[Jiharo]

VNs meant like an e-book to me. I only purchase those that I find have good stories(synopsis can always be read on vndb). I do track monthly releases as well so I do like to see more VNs that have awesome stories though speaking of all the VNs I own most of them come from KEY/FAVORITE. A few good ones I like come from minori etc. Since I don't really game. I like to spend my free time either watching anime or read VNs to pass time.

[Intrinsic]

VNs hit a sweet spot for me packing everything I liked into one package.

 

I like narrative, but western stories are often quite reserved often following very safe and conventional plot lines and ways of thinking. Even the “controversial” reading material created in the west is almost formulaic

 

I like reading but I read slowly. Without other stimuli, like sound and nice art, I would often lose the will to grind through more brown and black pages to extra the story hidden within. Also I like some visual images with the story, so that enjoying a vivid scene is not all a test of one’s imaginative abilities. Typically if western media starts adding pictures to a medium that medium loses depth and maturity. VNs retain full novel depth and their mature content while providing beautiful art, and other stimuli while reading.

 

I like anime style art, so I was attached to Japanese RPG games, but I found that I don’t like repetitive girding, I like narrative, so these types of games were not for me. VNs on the other hand were exactly what I was really looking for.

 

The music with NVs can add depth, and simply having a sound track adds value

 

The themes provided in VNs paint the picture they want to paint without worrying too much about what people might think. Harems, perfectly crafted girls, taboo scenarios, strong human emotion and desires are painted without restraint. So many basic human desires and emotions look bad in the public eye, so they are simply avoided in other media, as not to offend anyone and gain mass appeal. VNs not only use these “awkward” themes but they have refined these desires and feelings into acute pieces of art.

 

Character stories are by far my favorite. I don’t much care for worldly events. I like when the world acts as a stage for a character’s story and conflict. In western media it’s often the other way around and the characters are a lot shallower and are almost more like props for a more global story. I don’t care about global stories, and like personal struggle, conflict, and development to be the story, rather than be part of a story.

 

Motivational messages and thoughts about life are often found in VNs. VNs novel toy with concepts about the human condition, how one should live life, how people almost need each other or how living certain ways can shape people. These philosophical concepts are great food for though. I’d go so far as to say that there is almost a subliminal message in Japanese media telling people that life is harsh and pushing forward regardless is worthwhile as there is a strange beauty in the darkness, confusion, and pain that is life. I like how these themes make me feel, and like the food for thought.

 

I like anime, but they often lack the depth you can get from a book. VNs provide that depth while still providing me with all the things I like about anime.

 

I like female characters, and cute things in my stories, and VNs deliver with prejudice

 

Even the visual novel industry is interesting. Companies work closely with fans and are rather transparent. We also might be on the verge of seeing more content official coming to the west.

 

Starting to read VNs I found myself acting like a kid again; staying up later than I should reading till all hours of the night simply because I was enjoy myself that much. I’ve not had that kind of experience with a game or any other type of media in quite a while. While I do enjoy other things, it’s not to the extent that I’d put off my chores and stay up till all hours of the night like some irresponsible youth. But then again, it’s great that I’ve once again found something in life I do enjoy that much.

[cryofrzd]

I feel VN is the perfect format. You get the active reading where you choose the tempo and get time to reflect like in books but you also get the graphics and often voice acting like in movies/anime. And VNs do not simply combine the best aspects of books and moving pictures, it lets you really take the role of the protagonist with choices.

 

To sum it up VN is the format for me, the other media are too strict in some aspects to beat the concept of VNs.

[zoom909]

It's the 3rd side of the triangle, with anime being one side, manga being another side, and VNs being another side.

I get the same 2D bishoujos, but in more detailed art.  I get the same loveable Japanese voicing and those cute little BGM songs that accompany my favorite characters.  I get the same types of romantic storylines, but more expanded.  And I get the first person perspective of becoming that lucky guy.

 

I'm not tired of moe like some people.  If it doesn't have the moe-moe doki-doki fuwa-fuwa mune-kyun ultra-bishoujos, I skip it.

[Clephas]

I don't mind moe... though I don't like it when it is the whole point of what you are watching/reading/playing.  Anime like Kiddy Grade manage to balance great story with fanservice and extreme moe, but ones like K-on exist solely for the sake of moe.  Games like Uruwashi no possess moe factors, but their story is the main point.  However, ones like Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka exist solely to moe you to death.