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"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.
eh, I'd rather choose either art or voice. manga ot audio book. i tend to lean towards Audio books because it leaves my eyes and hands free to do other things.
for me it's just a struggle. it requires me to give it all of my senses, like a movie, but it does so little to hold them. a single still image that changes once ever like 20 lines holds my interest for maybe 2 seconds if it's a good one. then the dialogue goes on for 5 minutes. it's almost always bottom of the barrel voice acting. I'll admit, having been completely put off by the biggest mainstream ones having no choices and just being shitty books, so i haven't tried any with choices, but the fact that the most popular ones don't really have choices... you just can't avoid a medium being defined by its biggest representatives. those are the ones that draw people in and hook them. clearly the choices aren't the thing fans of the medium like.
again, i just can't imagine having anything but an infinitely better time reading a manga. fate had me frustratedly dragging myself through it by the end. I've never actually managed to finish any others. if was so many hours of me begging it to be less slow. even with all the modern mods and fixes to make it as customizable of an experience as possible. it made me want to pull my hair out at times because of how tedious it was. like maybe if i ate 1000mg thc gummy i could melt into enough, but it's just so painfully slow otherwise.
You are correct in some ways, such as dedicating all your senses while giving you less on average to engage them, but are also over generalizing by saying it's always terrible voice acting, which just isn't true, it can be anime hammy, but I happen to really love well done over the top anime voice acting, which is a whole different style compared to something extremely realistic like The Last of Us. And if you don't like that style, that's okay, but it's not terrible.
I feel like biggest representatives could go to things like Danganronpa, Phoenix Wright, or Persona, which all feature choice and gameplay, and I'd say Danganronpa and Persona have good voice acting, with Persona's as excellent. I feel like generalizing that fans of the genre don't care about choice is just not correct for all fans, I personally dislike most of the choiceless VNs because they then rely extremely hard on story, for example I disliked House in Fata Morgana because that's a "reading a linear book" style of VN with no voice acting, and it's really long, and the soundtrack was not super amazing (compared to Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa, and Persona, which have OUT FUCKING STANDING soundtracks, and with a manga you're not getting a soundtrack that emotionally engages you and brings you back to listen to them long after completing the games as I have with those series.
i would consider persona to be a different genre. it's closer to Pokemon with a lot of dialogue. i guess I'm defining visual novels partly as things that don't have much gameplay. if there is a significant other portion of gameplay with complex mechanics outside of dialogue that's just a different thing in my book.
I... don't love persona, but that more because i can't get into the teenage highschool drama. the number of times i felt myself internally screaming "holy shit i don't care, you won't even remember this in 5 years" made me eventually realize I just wasn't having a great time. liked the Pokemon fights though. I could see myself loving a different game that plays similar with a more mature story.
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.
The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it's hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.
Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn't the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it's largely non-interactive.
Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there's a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it's so much stronger as a game.
Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people's fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I've played in a bit.
There's any number of "walking simulators" that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.
These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they're all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that's ok. And the semantic debate over what's a game and what isn't is just feels vibes based sometimes.
Most people have the media literacy of cabbage and wouldn't know a good story if it slapped them in the face with a huge pair of anime tits.
I'm light-years past caring what anons have to say about anything culture related.
Make your game like Zelda and Dark Souls with a ton of visual story telling
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
I have a copy of the full Steins;Gate manga that I admit to not having read yet. I've seen the anime (movies(OVAs?) not included), alongside Zero. And I found something a long time ago that would allow me to download the app on my android device and play in English (not sure there was an official option for that back then or even now). Now I am absolutely thinking of getting back into visual novels of that style (the left click only gameplay style) and Steins;Gate is on my list. This also reminds me I need to finish Saya no Uta.