One thing I've always found rather interesting and satisfying about visual novels is one of their most "game-like" features: the fact that as you proceed through them, you unlock things. Usually, it's nothing more than the images you've seen and the pieces of music you've heard over the course of the story, but it still provides a nice sense of satisfaction to "collect everything".
I like this because it's not something you really do with other forms of narrative media, outside of video games, obviously. Or, at least, the medium itself doesn't provide this sort of "permanent record" for you.
You can mark the pages in a book where your favourite scenes are, but the book doesn't do that for you. You can skip to your favourite line in a movie, but the Blu-Ray or streaming service doesn't do that for you. You can put your favourite song on loop, but the CD or music software doesn't do that for you.
You can, however, follow a favourite character's route through to completion in a visual novel and then be provided with a fine selection of event scenes that you can revisit at your leisure. In the case of eroge, you can typically re-experience erotic scenes by themselves. And you can often watch just the endings again.
It's this sense of gradually building up something of a "scrapbook" of your experiences that makes me feel a curious sense of attachment to every visual novel I've ever seen through to completion — and why I always find it remarkably difficult to delete them from my hard drive if I need to make space!
I know that I can just read the visual novel again to unlock all the stuff again — or just download a clear file — but there's something about that first time, that complete collection that you assembled yourself through your commitment to enjoying the story, that will always be special.
I'm feeling that with Nurse Love Addiction right now. Two more endings to go!
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