VISUAL NOVELS
In the English speaking world visual novels remain a little bit of a mystery. Anime is well on the road to social acceptance with every third person under the age of thirty seemingly in love with Death note or Full Metal Alchemist (granted, nothing more). Translations of popular manga are available in libraries and JRPGs are – if not cool – most definitely a thing, thanks to 100 iterations of Final Fantasy. But visual novels are still a little bit underground, unknown and a mystery. It’s hard to hide from the pornographic content. Sure, as a society we spend a great deal of our time appreciating the delights on offer at pornhub, but the Japanese are into tentacle sex, and forced sex and schoolgirl sex and all sorts of terrible taboos, so therefore the natural assumption is that anything Japanese involving sex is all kinds of icky.
However, I’ve dipped my toe in the waters of Visual novels and I want more. I’ve started a few and for one reason or another, rarely finished, so this blog represents an attempt to motivate myself into doing just that. I thought, also, that it would be nice if in a small way I could increase the exposure , the reputation and the Western knowledge of the artform while I’m in the process and blog my journey and rate/rank the games as I go. I’m going to be systematic and playthrough early entries in the canon that are translated into English, hopefully taking in the good and bad as I go and discovering a few classics and a few pieces of nonsense along the way.
There are no rules and no restrictions. If something is terrible and demotivating me I can stop. There’s no compulsion to take every route and see every ending if I don’t want to. Visual novels are akin to books and I don’t force myself to the end of every crap book – I do, however, like to know a bit about them before judging them as such.
Sexual content is not a problem for me but my interest is not in straightforward eroge. It’s boring and there’s too much slurping. If the story is poor I’m likely to move on relatively swiftly. I find the representation of sex interesting, but too much of it is a little overwhelming. This should be, first and foremost a fun project or it won’t get very far. I make no promises as to speed – there’s no rush. I’m too old and too busy with a day job to be able to. Plus, there’s a second project.
PLAYSTATION JRPGS
I’ve loved JRPGs ever since I played some Final Fantasy, but never got around to exploring the genre the way it deserves. I’ve arbitrarily picked to playthrough all the available games, in English from the Playstation, since that’s the era of some of the most famous entries. I could have chosen the SNES because I still haven’t finished FFVI or Chrono Trigger, but I didn’t. The rules are the same. Play, report, rate in an arbitrary manner. Don’t stress about walkthroughs and don’t stress about finishing a game that you hate – with JRPGs I want to be sure to give a game enough time to stick and enough time for me to understand its world and systems, so 3-4 hours minimum seems fairly reasonable. Again, it’s important to note that I’m doing this at a snail’s pace – I don’t get the time I would like to play games and it’s most likely these will be played on my daily commute.
A note about ratings
I am in awe of the number of bloggers undertaking these types of projects and doing them efficiently and more systematically than I will (crpgaddict, in particular). However, I’m not in awe of these arbitrary rating systems that break a game genre down into a number of facets and then apply a score for each one, then added up to give an overall score. Do I have a better system? Hell no, but I’ve come up with something a bit more freeform that I’d like to use and it goes like this.
How much fun did I have. Out of 100.
Or something like that. How intriguing was the game, also. How playable. How much of a ROMP. (because roleplays should be a good old ROMP, right?
One can discuss an overabundance of random encounters, necessity of grinding, quality of story and graphical stimulation in finer detail but I don’t think they should inherently contribute to the overall score. It’s easy to imagine that one or all of these things is a bit weak but the game just gelling on a level you wouldn’t expect and it’s a good thing to discuss why. Or similarly with VNs.
So, onwards with the project. Let’s inspire some love. Or hate.
Games With Stories 