I think its more when does it stop being a VN and just a game an anime you don’t have freedom your watching through the eyes of the character your not being the character at least that’s what I think anyway.
True it would be more a conglomeration of the two where you move away from a VN, but you don’t go far enough to be an anime so…an interactive anime I guess? It will be interesting to see, I personally love VR and all the innovation that will come with it so it will be exciting to see how it changes all the different game genres.
Japanese VN companies have a very small interest in West. And I don’t think OELVNs can change that. I never read OELVNs for the same reason I don’t read Western mangas (that are incorrectly called manga). VNs are something Eastern, and I think they should remain that way.
As for the last question, you mean VN companies will change their target because of the state of the market? I hope so. First, by start creating more non-H VNs and let the +18 ones just limited to a small number. By taking this off, there will be a higher chance of better stories (but they could still create ecchi crap), because they would hardly write the plot just to be an excuse to the H, and there would be a bigger demographic of people who want better stories.
I don’t really see the appeal in moeges, because for me moe+men doesn’t really mix together. Adding males in the thing takes out the pureness of moe. That’s why I’d rather watch a pure moe anime, than play a moege that only has moe and the story is complete crap.
As for VR in VNs, nope. I hate 3D. 3D has ruined the animated movies’ industry. Movies back then were 100 times better than they are today. Nowadays everything about those movies is crap (romance, characters, story and even soundtrack. People who like “Let It Go” probably have never listened to “A Whole New World” or “Love Is a Song”). So, I don’t want this drug in the VN industry.
Hatsune miku has the 3d down pretty well I say and in anime yes the quality TODAY is terrible couldn’t watch the new code grass anime/ova because of the 3d mech battles. Its a hit or miss with 3d rendered anime characters. Not sure if you could keep a 2d styled background that looked like it fit in it’d be pretty hard for a 3d VN but not impossible. It just hasn’t been executed to well YET. People thought the atom couldn’t be split but eventually people did not we have Nuclear reactors bombs etc.
The only problem I have with this is that decision branching in modern games are worse than those from 10 or 20 years ago. It’s at the point where developers add choices to say “it’s a branching storyline!” and then ultimately make it so that none of your decisions had any impact whatsoever.
I don’t think you understand what I was saying. I wasn’t saying the VN market was cutting it’s self off from the world. The way that VNs are presented and formatted is what cuts them off from the world.
In the west, the pure VNs that become well known, are either gimmicky, perverted, or targeted at girls on Tumblr.
You then get things like AA that lots of people like, and is seen as an outlier from the normal standard of VNs with gameplay. You also get games like Danganronpa that get criticized for not being a game until half an hour in, at which point the players have lost interest.
For every one person who says “yay, VN elements” you know there’ll be a crowd of people going “oh, so it’s anime? Great…”
VNs are expanding. They have an audience that is still growing, arguably more than it has for a long time. The market is still full of awful writing, needless fanservice, and gimmicks for Youtubers to make money from. There are still millions of people who don’t give a damn, and would write any VN off instantly for not being interactive within the first 20 minutes.
No matter how well the western movement of VNs go, in the immediate future, they will still be seen as VNs are today, and they will still be a minor gaming presence that’s existence is questionable.
Still, if AAA developers keep going as they are, the market will lessen in quality, and indie works, including VNs, will be more noticeable.
I wouldn’t say there is an explosion of VN popularity at all. It’s an obscure topic for most. I wouldn’t say Sekai Project is a really well known name. I don’t think anyone I know outside of Kazamatsuri, or anyone I see at conventions, would even know who SP are.
It’s nice to be passionate and hopeful for the future of VNs in the west, but let’s not go overboard.
It’d essentially be a first person movie.
Frozen is really no different from the older Disney princess films. It’s the same formula, just with a lesson that’s more fitting for a more commercialized society.
I was a big Disney fan, I had boxes of VCRs everywhere. I agree, most of the 3d stuff is trash. You can’t compare The Incredibles or Cars to things like The Rescuers or The Fox and the Hound in a positive light. But just because the industry had a slump in the mid to late 2000s doesn’t mean 3D animation was to blame. Wall-E was the best animated film I’d seen since Brother Bear.
Right now it’s at the point where modern Disney films are trying to capture the imaginations of a totally different audience to what they once were, with completely different staff and working conditions so you’re never going to get the same atmosphere from them as with older films. Still, it isn’t the 3D that is at fault.
Toy Story and Monsters Inc didn’t feel like traditional Disney films, but they were good films. They were more emotional than say… The Black Cauldron.
When I think of what worlds I’d like to explore in a KH game, I’d choose WiR or Frozen over The Jungle Book or Aladdin.
But yeah… 3D in VNs is awful.
The industry just isn’t experienced with it enough yet. They don’t know how much time has to be set aside for it, or what elements are easy or hard to change. There probably isn’t enough funding right now to really push forward the quality, but that kind of makes sense, seeing as 3D is meant to be a cheap alternative to 2d animation in the anime industry.
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Your not wrong far from it your right, but this argument can be applied to other places look at gaming as a whole in the last generation, the amount of shovel ware games that came out easily match if not eclipse the amount of games that had any value attached to them, for proof of this go look at any game retailers bargain bin you can stop when you find the Wii version of “Deal or No Deal”. An abundance of bad doesn’t kill a market unless it makes it impossible to find the good for the bad, which you could make this argument for VN’s because for every arguably good game there are easily 5 bad games, but I don’t feel like it is killing the VN market any more than it did the Wii last gen.
[quote=“Takafumi, post:25, topic:1248”]
You also get games like Danganronpa that get criticized for not being a game until half an hour in, at which point the players have lost interest.For every one person who says “yay, VN elements” you know there’ll be a crowd of people going “oh, so it’s anime? Great…”
[/quote] This comes with a market that is just now becoming acclimated to VN type games. For every person who loves to spend their weekend doing nothing but running around on CoD yelling at the 12 years on on XBL, there are a crowd of people that have a number of colorful things to call those people. Candidate for understatement of the year…VN’s aren’t for everyone. I have a friend who hates RPG’s because he can’t stand story based games because he finds story lines boring and gameplay to be king, then he probably isn’t going to like VN’s which is fine he doesn’t have to like them, doesn’t mean he is going to kill the industry.
[quote=“Takafumi, post:25, topic:1248”]
Still, if AAA developers keep going as they are, the market will lessen in quality, and indie works, including VNs, will be more noticeable.
[/quote]I agree with you 100 percent here the state of AAA titles has brought about the indie boom that has been present the last couple of years so I see no reason why alternate game styles shouldn’t get swept up in it and ride the way which I feel is what is happening anyway.
[quote=“Takafumi, post:25, topic:1248”]
I wouldn’t say there is an explosion of VN popularity at all. It’s an obscure topic for most. I wouldn’t say Sekai Project is a really well known name. I don’t think anyone I know outside of Kazamatsuri, or anyone I see at conventions, would even know who SP are.
[/quote]I should have said relatively for my point. If you look at where the VN market was even a couple of years ago to where it is in the west today it has been a relatively large growth, its still nowhere near the level of main stream gaming but it has a presence now, its a small and infantile presence but its there and can be nurtured and grown. Same deal with SP they are becoming a big name where it matters which is in their market which are VN fans. They will have to establish a base market first, and then is when you can reach out to those that are outside that market and try to pull those people in, the fact that they have had as much success as they did with the “big” kickstarters (Grisaia and Clannad) is a sign that they have a fertile ground to grow their market over here, but it is still only just now starting.
[quote=“Takafumi, post:25, topic:1248”]
It’s nice to be passionate and hopeful for the future of VNs in the west, but let’s not go overboard.
[/quote]Like I said don’t get me wrong I don’t believe for a second that VN’s are about to explode and become “main stream”, but what I do know is that a friend of mine called me the other day, and jokingly complained about getting my weeb games off of steam because every time he opens steam he sees a new VN being advertised, so I would say yeah I’m optimistically hopeful for where the western VN market is headed.
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I disagree you don’t have a choice in movies they are creating interactive movies but then isn’t a visual novel not a story you interact with ? Besides this wouldn’t be a seamless transition to another. Vns don’t give you split seconds to decide an answer. That’s why its more akin to games since you can stop and think about the choice to make next.
[quote=“Bowiie, post:26, topic:1248”]
I agree with you 100 percent here the state of AAA titles has brought about the indie boom that has been present the last couple of years so I see no reason why alternate game styles shouldn’t get swept up in it and ride the way which I feel is what is happening anyway.[/quote]
If point and clicks can get into the spotlight, VNs can.
I don’t think you should because, IMO, the original topic you brought in doesn’t really have much worth discussing. Like I said, there isn’t much you can do with a “visual novel”. It’s a “novel” exactly because it is text-based and it describes the surroundings and environment and characters much like a novel would. Without those descriptions, it wouldn’t be much of a novel anymore.
I’m sorry, but the term “Visual Novels” aren’t eastern at all. Nobody uses “Visual Novel” or even “VN” in Japan. VNs are a medium, originated in the east, that can apply to any form of story. So, yes, OELVNs are worthy of being called VNs.
Too bad the 18+ ones are the one that have more sales. Except, of course, the works by big-name groups such as key.
Having not played any of those modern games, I find it pretty disheartening to learn that ;_;
It’s not a story you can interact with; A visual novel is a novel that is supported by images and sound, as opposed to being purely text. Please remember that we have VNs like planetarian which have no choices at all. Sure, you can call it a “Kinetic Novel” like Key does, but it’s still essentially a VN.
Having a VN using VR would make it an “interactive movie” more than anything else. You can (possibly) make choices that will affect the story, but everything will be narrated to you, instead of reading it as text (which is what a novel does)
Too bad they aren’t getting that much into the spotlight. I love adventure games, and grew up on them. Heck, that’s what got me interested in VNs in the first place.
There were some big ones through the past few years. The Telltale stuff, Tesla Effect, McPixel, Deponia, Yesterday, The Cat Lady, the updated Grim Fandango release, Broken Age, Life is Strange. That’s just off the top of my head, ignoring the mobile market of course.
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I still haven’t had the time to play any telltale games, but how do they compare to the Visual Novel experience?
I don’t think it would be unreasonable to have a 3D environment with high resolution 2D characters. I think the VN would have to justify its use of a 3D environment though. That automatically increases the hardware requirements and VNs are pretty great for not being so demanding on hardware compared with contemporary games.
Reading text with a VR headset is awful, or so I’ve heard. (As others here pointed out.) You can alleviate it in some ways by placing the text inside of the world and increasing its size according to some VR developers iirc.
To me it seems VR is more useful for placing you inside of a world that you can directly interact with and explore. As such, and as others pointed out, a dating sim makes more sense in this regard.
If there were a VN with VR as one of its selling points, I’d probably check it out just for that though. It would be an interesting and initially unique experience I suspect.
In contrast to that, I’d prefer to play a terrible VN written by someone who thought they could do better than they did rather than listen to the same person whine about not being able to do anything. xP A certain level of arrogance or confidence seems to be necessary to get anywhere at all. (The “quick” <anything> (VN, game, etc) that gets developed merely to pad a wallet I could do without of course. Though I think that was your main point there. No?)
More to the point though, if it did decline to that point it would be a wonderful opportunity for the more skilled people to band together and create something new. (It doesn’t necessarily need to be a, or lead a, resurgence… but that would be nice as well.) 
(I kinda promised myself I wouldnt get involved in this topic (apparently I have absolutely no resolve, since I said the same thing about twitter), but I have to jump in right here since we’re actually talking about VNs. )
Yeah, with a lot of them its pretty much just choices that will get you into different routes. I guess there are often choices that will get you slightly different CGs/H-scenes or something, but not anything like Angel Beats!'s choices.
[quote=“Pepe, post:30, topic:1248”]
Too bad the 18+ ones are the one that have more sales. Except, of course, the works by big-name groups such as key.
[/quote]I think I read this statement at least four times before I released what felt so off about it to me. Th problem is, within the past 5 years, Key is really the only big-name group that has released VNs without sexual content.
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No idea. I don’t play video games.
Wouldn’t that be a bit weird though? You may as well just play it on the 3DS.
And I’d prefer to not waste my time with either~ The OELVN scene needs to find people who can actually write, but that’s a hard thing to come by.
Hey, the indie games coming out for discontinued consoles are pretty popular.
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as much as they emphasize choice it doesn’t matter at all really (I can think of a couple times where it does something besides change the text to a max of 5 lines after the choice and that’s it). I’d say it’s closer to reading something like planetarian on auto than reading a full on VN. They stories are usually pretty good though.
I seen VR brought up in this thread and I don’t really think that would work at all, text in VR headsets is already near impossible to read unless it is massive, the problem is the headsets don’t have a high enough resolution and with the way the lens causes a fish eye effect to help the field of view and the angle so that the eyes can easily read both screens as one distorts the text even further.
as for the Telltale games they are pretty decent but I have found that when you make choices most of the time they are pretty meaningless and don’t effect the who story in my experience anyway, you don’t really go down routes you more just have a single event in time change.If a character dies or lives then the character wont show up any more but the story will progress the same, it is like your stuck in one route no matter what you do.
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