Right-o, after last night’s tremendous windfall in the form of a ton of Visual Novels, great visual novels, grand ones.
Another one by the people who made my favorite things of all time, Yume Miru Kursuri: A Drug that Makes You Dream
First of all, I bet some of you are like “FaustianFool, what the devil is one of these visual novels? Is it one of those new things only possible with new-fangled high-tech sorcery like them ePhones and iBooks and uPants?”
My response would of course be “Old-people read my blog?”
Of course, in all seriousness a visual novel is software. A visual novel is a piece of software that is essentially a choose your own adventure book. You know those there Fancy Phoenix Wright games? That’s a visual novel. Of course it’s a bit more gameplay heavy than most.
By that I mean that most of them are literally pretty much just a choose your own adventure book. You keep on truckin’ through the game, hit a dialog option, pick it and keep going. Now, I know what you’re thinking. ”Sure the Choose Your Own Adventure Books were rad as all hell, but I mean I remember those plots and characters, and they weren’t the best.” Visual novels are much better about character depth and plot being unique.
In fact, I bet you already know something based on a visual novel. Fate/Stay Night, Clannad and Umineko are all examples of things based on such novels.
But nobody ever reads them, aside from me and a few other people as far as I can tell. It might have something to do with where you find them, for example, I got my first ones from /a/ on 4chan back before it was split into /jp/ and /a/. After that I was hooked, and couldn’t find them anymore on that most… I don’t even have flowery language to describe it, so let’s go with that place. I scoured the web, and apparently the only place to get visual novels are 1) 4chan 2)Torrents. 3) And most commonly of all, in the depths of the internet, Hentai forums.
Yes that’s right, I regularly plumb those depths. If I did not I would have never played the visual novel that I retroactively realized ruined the High-School Romance Genre for me. Yume Miru Kursuri: A Drug that Makes You Dream. Specifically the Aeka route. First of all, the main character mans up in a way that blows most of the other theoretical High School Womances out of the water. I legitimately couldn’t play the other routes my first playthrough because I did that one first by accident. And… I don’t recommend that. Because of various things that occur during the route (What you want spoilers fuck you).
But visual novels are great, and more people should check them out. Oh sure. A large (Read As: 85%) have sex scenes, some to the point that they’re completely dominated by them (I’m looking at you X-Change games), and these are inevitably really bad.
However, some, some are really fantastic. I mean seriously. I wouldn’t be writing this if they weren’t. So yeah. Visual Novels. Check ‘em out.
Also: I’m back. Bitches.
