“Gameplay” is subjective.
I never understood why people bitch about reading in games. Like, you do know people read books for fun, right? JRPGs are some of the most beloved games ever and a good chunk of them are pretty much just reading a ton of dialogue and descriptions.
idk, i kind of can’t stand this format of visual novel.
i love books. i love story driven games. virtual novels like this somehow manage to capture the worst aspects of both. like, it’s a book that forces you to read it slowly, or at least at a somewhat fixed pace. i hate being locked to a computer to read, i hate having to either continuously click to advance to the next slids after every 2 sentences or less or have to read at a fixed pace, i honestly hate having low quality badly mixed sounds effects in my ear while I’m trying to read.
these aren’t low gameplay games. these are just extra tedious books. I’d so much rather just read a manga every time.
As a counter I find the fact that VNs sidestep having to describe all sorts of setting and character related things by just showing you them instead with beautiful art work and at times voice acting.
To me that actually increases the pace instead of slows it down, if you think about what you’re not having to read. I do also dislike reading VNs at a computer, though, so I’ll only get them on portable systems unless it’s REALLY good, like Slay the Princess, and that game would simply not be the same if it were a book, it’s extremely reliant on choice.
I enjoyed Class of 09, one of few VNs designed around English VA and auto-continuation, as well as having very tight comedic timing.
That last one is key that so many games utterly fail at - waiting until the line is completely finished from the VA’s laborious delivery and they’ve completely trailed off before reading the next one.
Gameplay really is about how much agency you have. Visual Novels are usually not games, as plenty of them have zero user agency. You’re just reading a comic book at that point, not playing a game.
I’ve been reading a ton of these things the last few weeks. I can’t bring myself to say “I’m playing these games” over “I’m reading these novels.” Because most of them have had literally no choices to make, or the choices you make have zero effect on anything and are just there as a joke.
To make a good game, the writers must have great creative influence over the development process
To contain their power, there needs to be books on shelves you can read
There is barely any gameplay because the developers chose to focus solely on writing, art, and music instead.
Tsukihime and the whole Fate series also started from visual novels.
i mean sure, but we’re actually approaching the edge of what can even be considered a game.
i don’t call those games personally. they are vaguely interactive novels. imo a physical choose your own adventure book has more “gameplay” than most of these virtual novels.
i honestly don’t think game is the right term here. these are books with an odd format. stein’s gate included.
It depends on the VN and its implementation. The existence of things like Slay the Princess, 999, Raging Loop, Phoenix Wright, AI: The Somnium Files, these are all inextricably linked with player participation and choice, as well as very dense narrative.
Then you have ones like Steins;Gate that don’t have very much choice at all, that’s a lot closer to a book in most respects, but as a blanket VNs are, more often than not, absolutely games.
I wish Japan would stop it with the terrible German language inclusions in their media.
So you Germans find it cringey? I am a fan of German and can’t get enough. Frieren! Stroheim! Jäger! Mondstadt! Such beautiful words!
As a German, I don’t mind it at all. I guess it can be a bit confusing when watching German subs/dub. But I always think of it as a neat little easter egg when I come across a German name.
Calling someone “freezing” is stupidly cringe, yes. German verbs generally make for bad and very confusing names. Stroheim is also wrong, it would be Strohheim since it is a compound word of Stroh (straw - as in the dry grass type) and Heim (home, or asylum, depending on the context). In this case here it is even Denglish, as it says “stone gate” but with one word being German - and within German, a space separating a compound word like this, is a “Deppenleerzeichen” (fool’s space). And don’t even get me started on Japanese trying to pronounce German words, especially vocalists in their songs… It’s like little kids singing along to Japanese lyrics. It’s usually not understandable by native speakers. Jäger in Japanese media is often used for Nazi-esque characters btw, like Eren in AoT
