2476: The Growth of the Visual Novel

When discussing my full writeup on Supipara earlier today, it occurred to me that visual novels are in a much better place here in the West than they were even a few years ago.

When I first encountered visual novels — like, first first encountered them — they were like a hidden gem of the Internet. Gorgeous Japanese pixel art, interesting stories, memorable characters and porn, all in one happy package. Naturally, despite a number of them having been officially translated by the well-established (and still standing) JAST USA, they were mostly distributed through… shall we say, questionable means. (If I remember correctly, this was still the days of KaZaA and Limewire over dial-up, well before BitTorrent became a thing.)

I had a lot of fun with some of these early visual novels but was never quite sure if it was “acceptable” to talk about them, what with them being widely regarded as porn first and foremost. Fortunately, a number of friends and I all discovered Parsley’s wonderful True Love around the same time, and found ourselves thoroughly captivated by its wide variety of different characters, its interesting stat-based gameplay and the various mini-stories each of the game’s heroines got you involved with.

Other memorable early visual novels I encountered included Ring-Out!! which was about a young girl sold into essentially sex slavery dressed up as professional (all-lesbian) wrestling for the gratification of rich, bored playboys with nothing better to do and less-than-progressive attitudes towards women. While this game’s plot was a thinly-veiled excuse to have, well, lots of lesbian wrestling in lingerie, it stuck with me long after I first played it because it presented the protagonist as a very “human” character caught up in events beyond her control, not quite sure how to deal with what was essentially a horrific situation to be caught in. There were a number of different narrative paths through the game, each of which explored what might happen if the protagonist responded to her situation in different ways. Short version, though: if ever you wanted to feel really, really bad about popping a boner over some lesbians doing lesbian things, Ring-Out!! is the game for you.

I also quite vividly remember Three Sisters Story, because although it presented you with the opportunity to bump uglies with all three of the titular sisters over the course of the narrative, doing so would cause you to suffer the indignity of a bad ending where you didn’t end up with any of them after the dramatic finale. This was surprising to me, and confirmed something I already suspected: there was a lot more going on in many of these games than excuses to display lovingly-drawn images of depraved sexual acts.

It would be a good few years before I got back into visual novels, and Japanese games in general. I typically credit Katawa Shoujo with my current interest in Japanese popular media, despite it being largely Western-developed, and by this point, discussion of visual novels — including their lewd bits — had become much more “acceptable” to many, though still not all, people.

After Katawa Shoujo, I decided to catch up on a number of visual novels, primarily from JAST, who were still pumping them out, and a couple from relative newcomer MangaGamer. I had a great time with many of them, and still fondly look back on a number of these titles such as the gloriously silly My Girlfriend is the President and the lengthy, emotional road trip story that is Kira-Kira!

Visual novels still hadn’t quite hit the mainstream, though, and this was disappointing to me, as here was a genre of game — no, I’ve often argued it’s a distinct medium in its own right — that was exploring subjects and themes more traditional games typically shied away from for various reasons, whether it be concerns over the subject matter itself to simply not being sure how to make a game about people just living their life actually fun and interesting to play. I wanted more people to appreciate this fantastic medium and enjoy the stories I’d enjoyed, but it remained difficult to convince many people that they were anything more than just porn, even if I cited specific examples of how they clearly weren’t.

When I look around today, I see a very different landscape. Visual novels are everywhere on Steam, and not just from Japanese developers: these days we have works from English, American, Russian, Korean authors… authors from all over the world who want to tell their story in the distinctive way that the visual novel medium allows them to. And the genre/medium as a whole has, I feel, finally hit the mainstream.

That’s absolutely delightful to see for me, as someone who was around when they were very much an “underground” sort of experience; the growth of the visual novel sector — both adult and all-ages — has been wonderful to observe, and so long as there are great stories that people want to tell, there seems to be no shortage of new experiences to enjoy.

There’s still work to be done — most notably with regard to the distribution of adults-only titles, which can’t be sold on leading digital distribution platform Steam in their uncut forms, and which some companies are selling the sexual content for separately rather than simply providing a free patch or alternative download — but for the most part, we’re in a much better place than we were even a couple of years ago. And, I feel, it’s only going to continue to get better from here.

Also, buy Supipara. (Read more about why you should do this here.) I want to see the other chapters released!