I really do love visual novels as a medium. I like RPGs in general, but I'd say my biggest problem is that I'm much more fond of the Role Play element than the Game element of them. My favorite RPGs integrate the two so well that the game parts don't feel like a slog, but, like, at the same time, I'm pretty sure if you offered me a version of each one that had the gameplay cut out and replaced with cut scenes so I could just do the roleplaying bits... I dunno, I'd be at least tempted to try it at least.
And a visual novel is pretty much an RPG that's all RP and nearly no G, so, like, when done well, it's my ideal form of an RPG. Especially since most visual novels are heavily focused on romance, because, you know, I'm an unfathomably sad and pathetic creature who can only experience romantic love vicariously through works of fiction, so doing some romance heavy RP is good for my malnourished soul.
...it just kinda sucks that most visual novels available here in the US are kinda ass.
And, like, they think they're cute about it, you know? All "Tee hee I made a visual novel as a joke lol!" and you can just feel the disdain for the very concept at its core. Or maybe not disdain, necessarily, but, like, a lack of sincerity - they refuse to let you think for a moment that they aren't in on "the joke" that they think the genre is.
Like, I played Date Everything, and that work definitely had some love and craft go into it, sure - a lot of talented voice actors, some very sharply written jokes, incredibly well-drawn gijinkas for the various talksprites, lots of genuine work went into it for sure. But it's kind of a shallow experience when you go through it - I had fun playing it, but I have no desire to revisit it, and that's kind of damning for a novel in my opinion. A novel, visual or otherwise, should have enough meat to it to be worth revisiting.
Compare it to Sucker For Love, which, yes, is also admittedly a comedic visual novel that's kind of dunking on the very premise of visual novels (tee hee the anime girls are actually eldricth abominations that will maim/kill you), but nonetheless takes the medium and its characters seriously enough to tell a very compelling story despite its irreverence. Like, for Estir's chapter, sections of it are a play written in trochaic octameter, i.e. the same meter that Edgar Allen Poe's poem "The Raven" is written in, which is clever as hell given that the the snippets of the play The King In Yellow that appear in the novel of the same name are clearly inspired by Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death," so giving it that meter makes Sucker For Love's version of The King In Yellow an authentically Edgar Allen Poe vibe!
That's clever! That's something you can dig your teeth into! It makes the world of Sucker for Love, and Esiter/the King in Yellow herself for that matter, so damn appealing and interesting that I'm kinda pissed it's so damn short! My only real complaint about that game is that there isn't more of it - I don't want one episode with Estir, I want a 30 episode whirlwind romantic horror comedy fulls of wacky shenanigans, heart-melting romance, and gut-churning cosmic horror!
And yeah, that's probably why Black Tabby Games's visual novels have such a vice grip on my brain - they're well written and fucking substantial in size, so there's a lot for me to chew on, you know? So much to gain from reading and rereading them, exactly what the medium should be doing. But, like, I don't want just one studio making visual novels of that size and quality, you know? We should have more! More! More in quantity, more in variety, hell, even make some nonromantic ones for the people who are aromantic or just don't need/want fiction to cover that topic for their sad, pathetic vicarious wish fulfillment.
...but don't stop making the romantic ones, I need... I need them. They're precious to me.
(Ideally we'd be able to import more Japanese visual novels too, get some of the genre-makers over here in the states. But I'm not holding my breath on that - nor am I competent enough with computers to get that shit working on my laptop.)
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