Painting The Medium / Visual Novels

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• General: A wave dash, the alien-to-English-punctuation tilde-like symbol is used in Japanese for things like "denoting semi-excited but not alarmed tone", "for cute or comic effect" at the end of sentences. Tildes or something of their likelihood can be seen retained in English text translations as well. Which preserves at the very least a degree of contrasts intended by the original. This convention eventually bled over into fanfics and Western web-original fiction, often used to denote a singsong tone.
• In Dawn Chorus, the character of Coach Devon initially begins the story with that as his name on dialogue boxes, but once he mentions that he is happy to not be referred to by his job title it changes to just "Devon".
• In the demo for Don't Take It Personally, I Just Don't Like You, which is stylized like a hybrid between an early nineties computer interface and a VHS tape, anytime the two leads start to argue the picture starts to degrade, to the point where the screen becomes almost completely obscured by static in one particularly nasty fight. And arguing too much with Rose will cause her to rewind the tape.
• In Ever17, the text box changes color depending on the current POV character — green for Takeshi, blue for the Kid, and gray for Blickwinkel himself.
  • Remember11 has the same effect — the text box is red for Kokoro, blue for Satoru, and gray for the single POV-less scene.
• Fate/stay night colours the screen red or fills the screen with static whenever the protagonist is badly wounded (or going through an epiphany). In the final route of the game, Heaven's Feel, the screen cracks whenever the protagonist uses his Deadly Upgrade which induces brain damage; the static becomes omnipresent, and certain words are whited out or simply not there, as he slowly loses his precious memories and ability to recall events, providing a chilling and saddening effect.
• In Umineko: When They Cry, red text is always true. Blue text is used to present theories that deny witches. There's also gold text. The Anime of the Game shows this by making the screen take on the appropriate color tint and having the words fly around the speaker.
  • This carried over to its Wild Mass Guessing pages, until TV Tropes no longer allowed non-link colored text on the wiki.
• In CLANNAD, when Kotomi plays the violin, the screen (picture, textbox and all) constantly shakes to illustrate how bad it sounds in lieu of us actually having to hear it.
• With Rewrite when Kotarou stops to let the player think about whether they want to hang out with Shizuru or not he lampshades the weight attached to really inconsequential seeming choices.
  Kotarou: Incidentally, I always seem to think hard about little choices like this. Is that normal?
  • Later, when Shizuru makes Kotarou forget her name her name turns to ?? for a few lines.
  • The Terra route also does this when it locks in your choices so that you must follow the only path to saving humanity. Choices pop up all the time, but you can only pick one option.
• In Little Busters!, there is a game mechanic where characters who lose fights with another character are given an Embarrassing Nickname, which shows up with fanfare on the screen. At the end of a fight this is normal, but at other points in the game when a character gives another a nickname (such as when Kurugaya calls Riki 'Boobs Demon' or when Kyousuke's Digging Yourself Deeper actions causes him to be branded a 'Lolicon Suspect') the same little textbox shows up. This carries on to the anime, too, where the game-like screen is even more out of place.
• In Katawa Shoujo In Rin's route, there are a large number of confusing choices, hinting at the protagonist's inability to understand her.
• Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors splits the narration between character box dialogue and paragraphs of text up until the ending. Everything in the narration on the bottom screen of the DS is Akane in the past recounting what she sees through Junpei's eyes in the future. When the epilogue begins, Junpei and Akane's psychic link momentarily goes out of sync, cutting off Akane's In-Universe narration of her narration of Junpei's ordeals and instead describes what happened - from the first person - as she went through the Nonary Game. At the end, when the connection is re-established to the point where they can talk in real-time the narration is still not like what it had previously been since Akane is now safe and no longer needs to use it to survive.
• In The Great Ace Attorney, it's established that English and Japanese are spoken throughout the game.
  • Jezail Brett speaking Queen's English is represented with unreadable cursive script due to her peers being unable to understand it aside from her interpreter, although she does say "yes", "sorry", and "god damn you" in the same cursive style. She even has "Shut Up!" written in clear cursive.
  • Barok van Zieks has a unique "Objection!" with blue blackletter font.
  • In the official English localization, when characters are supposed to be speaking Japanese, they use Japanese honorifics like -kun and -san in their dialogue.
• One scene in Go! Go! Nippon! has the image turn into a negative of itself, to represent the effect of Makoto's disgusting food on the player character.

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