Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

I'd say challenge or choice.

Like, a Choose Your Own Adventure book is more of a game than a light novel.

What about environmental storytelling? That I love the most.

My kind of story or storytelling is the text scattered in game world for you to read, to learn about the game world, setting, locations, characters and more. I love that the best.

Like in DOOM 2016, the actual plot is straightforward but there's so much to read in the codex. That appeals to me.

Edited by Dhiruxide on Aug 2nd 2019 at 5:01:57 PM

Eh, depends IMO. Ace Attorney is a visual novel series but it has plenty of minigames, logic puzzles, and a life bar, which to me makes it a proper videogame.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 2nd 2019 at 9:01:42 AM

visual novels are games and they should not havw a separate index.

Yeah, now that I think about it pretty much every visual novel worth its salt has puzzles, adventure game elements, and occasionally Multiple Endings.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 2nd 2019 at 9:03:02 AM

Yep, path choices are pretty much a constant in visual novels. Not all of them necessarily throw in mini games but I don't think I've ever seen one without branches.

im pretty sure the only reason visual novels are indexed separately from video games is the same reason manga and anime are indexed separately: pedantic Japanerds. there's no justification for it.

There are absolutely VNs without meaningful choices. I've heard them called "kinetic novels" but I don't know how common that terminology is. The majority of them don't really have any gameplay beyond occasionally picking an option from a list, either. The west tends to consider them "not games" for the lack of what most people consider gameplay, not because western otaku consider them better than regular games

Edited by Hylarn on Aug 2nd 2019 at 11:35:09 AM

It's for the same reason we split Anime from Western Animation, Manga from Comic Books: there's just something about "in Japan" that makes everyone flip out and insist "it's totally different enough to get a separate media category, you guys".

A visual novel is a category of video game, just like shooters, action games, RPGs, etc.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 3rd 2019 at 7:47:27 AM

right, but none of those game genres get their own folders on pages the way V Ns do. unless that's not supposed to be happening?

come to think of it, anime and manga usually don't get their own folders either, so i retract that complaint.

Edited by razorrozar7 on Aug 3rd 2019 at 5:09:15 AM

I don't consider V Ns to be video games because you don't play V Ns, you read V Ns.

They're not video game the same way "Choose Your Own Adventure" books aren't.

That one Black Mirror episode isn't a video game, either.

Yes, plenty of games use VN presentation to tell a story, but they also use cutscenes and no one considers them movie.

Now, I fully agree there should be no reason for animes and manga to have seperate folders, for that's like separating French movies from Indian ones, however, the general trend of animes being overwhelmingly based on mangas makes the different folders useful as a way to make things organized, while also avoiding stuff like repeated entries and the like.

I mean, by that logic Text Adventures aren't videogames either.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 3rd 2019 at 12:06:14 PM

Text adventures have far more interactivity than your average VN: there's puzzles and choosing where to go, etc.

Most V Ns have quite a bit less than even that, with most only having a few choices to set up which route you're gonna have and bugger all else.

Trust me, I've read plenty.

Sure, and then there's stuff like 428: Shibuya Scramble, which has more interactivity and challenge than some "actual" video games (i.e. "walking simulators," such as Firewatch). So there'a lot of granularity to the subject, but it's certainly beyond this website's categories.

Edited by Eschaton on Aug 3rd 2019 at 3:33:33 AM

it's not "beyond this website's categories". they're video games. they're interactive electronic entertainment.

This come down to whether we're defining things by what they're composed of or by what they do. Visual novels are (usually) interactive electronic media which argues for them being videogames, but in practice they're mostly text with a few illustrations and some sound, making them closer to fancy books then anything else

Choose Your Own Adventure books come to mind, which is basically an analog way to have a branching storyline. Visual novels are basically the digital version of that.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 4th 2019 at 10:04:39 AM

Look, the real reason why Visual Novels and other "Japan" stuff is kept away from the rest, is because Japanese stuff tends to be popular and tropey, and had a nasty habit of drowning out everything else, despite being only relevant to a rather niche audience. There's a reason why people would refer to TV Tropes as "Anime tropes" about a decade ago.

The classifications may or may not be scientifically correct, but it is considered a necessity.

Edited by Kayeka on Aug 4th 2019 at 10:24:43 AM

Well, classification systems are always artificial and don't capture all real complexity of a system. I read an article recently about why we should abolish our classical notion of species in biology. These things can always change.

as an anarchist im generally in favor of the abolition of arbitrary distinctions but is a good point and i concede that arbitrary doesn't automatically mean not useful

As far as TVT goes, sectioning anime and manga off on their own folder is useful because popular Japanese stuff tends to get adapted to multiple media without significant changes and we'd have a bunch of duplicate entries otherwise. Also people are actually really racist and there were regular calls to delete everything anime-related on the site before folders were introduced

On the other hand, sectioning VNs off doesn't really do much beyond making things slightly easier for people looking for specific examples

Look, the real reason why Visual Novels and other "Japan" stuff is kept away from the rest, is because Japanese stuff tends to be popular and tropey, and had a nasty habit of drowning out everything else, despite being only relevant to a rather niche audience.

...I think you (and a lot of other people here) are really overestimating how popular visual novels are here, or, really, outside of Japan in general. Most Visual Novel folders are lucky to have three examples, the VN board mostly exists to host the Nasuverse thread (which isn't particularly focused on VNs), we currently have 692 articles in /VisualNovel, compared to 12337 in /VideoGame, etc.

Yeah, V Ns are unbelieviably niche, and the ones that do have pages generally are also the ones with Anime adaptations, which more often than not displace the original.

The Dies Irae page, to give an exemple, was very anemic before the anime launched.

Besides, this is all very off-topic, so I suggest taking the discussion somewhere more appropriate.

Acclaim Entertainment 'Hall of Shame' (Zero Punctuation)

Well, I'd never heard about any of those stunts since I'm a filthy millennial, but that is pretty funny in a hindsight sort of way.