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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #61: The World Of Visual Novels

I've been researching the publishing model of visual novels in Japan this summer, since it's a sizable market over there and almost nonexistent in the West. It's rather fascinating, and worth discussing for the next few weeks.

Visual novels make up the biggest portion of the PC gaming market in Japan. They are loosely referred to as games, since the gameplay doesn't involve any real combat or skill. Visual novels are really adventure games where you point and click to get an unfolding story. Some of them have alternate outcomes when you have the main character choose a different path. Most of them are dating sims, games where the player is supposed to eventually hook up with the doe-eyed girls in the game, and get to the porn-style sex scenes. A lot of them feature everything icky the West has come to associate Japanese pop culture with: rape, tentacles and uncomfortably creepy, child-like girls. There are, however, quite a few of them that tell more ambitious stories than just another porno hook-up.

In Japan, a lot of aspiring creators in manga and anime start out in doujin groups, fan self-publishing circles, and visual novels might be one thing they create to sell at conventions. For some groups, it might be easier to make visual novels and sell them on CD-Rom than to publish paper comics, since it might require less drawing and any artistic limitations can be forgiven because the written text, is what carries the story through. In some cases, a few groups have gone from amateur doujinshi circles to full-blown media companies without actually publishing manga. I found three that were particularly striking.

Phantom of Inferno:

It takes more than some slick art and a bunch of porn scenes to make a successful eroge (that's what they call the adult ones) visual novel. Nitroplus seems to be the biggest and slickest of the visual companies right now, having made over 20 visual novel titles since 2000. Their plots cover the staple of genre fiction: heroes brainwashed into becoming assassins for vast conspiracies, conflicted heroes with demon swords, giant mecha battles, cyberpunk crime dramas with lots of violence and sex scenes with doe-eyed women with big tits. They even made a visual novel that was a Science Fiction Spaghetti Western where the gunslingers were alien women with big tits, full of geeky nods to key actors and directors in the genre. The company even has a separate division that produces Boy's Love visual novels, which I assume do not feature big tits.

Zoku Satsuriki no Django:

In visual novels, the story's the thing, and they become invaluable proof-of-concept for intellectual property and prospective franchises. Nitrolplus has already had anime adaptations produced and also a lot of merchandising that gets sold. It's a market with a huge crossover with the anime and manga market. Nitroplus has produced a couple of visual novels that are surprisingly ambitious and don't even feature porn sex scenes that are worth mentioning.

Saya no Uta:

SAYA NO UTA, or SONG OF SAYA, is possibly one of the best horror stories I've ever come across. The medical student hero recovering from an automobile accident winds up with brain damage that makes him see the world and the people in it as a literal morass of blood, gore and horror. The condition threatens to drive him to suicide until he meets Saya, the only being he sees as a normal, beautiful woman, and falls helplessly in love with her. What follows is a tale of Lovecraftian horror as the hero hides himself away with his new love, committing acts of murder and cannibalism, with our dawning realization that if he sees her as a beautiful woman, her true form might be something truly horrific, since she's not really human, and she could bring about the end of the world and Humanity itself. It has three different endings depending on the choices you click on as you play through the game. IDW actually published a US comic adaptation of it not long ago, but I never read it, so I wouldn't know how good it was.

Chaos;Head:

CHAOS;HEAD is another game that doesn't feature any porn sex, but instead has lots of paranoia and, like SAYA NO UTA, a Gnostic obsession with the questioning of Reality itself. The geeky and reclusive high school hero is drawn into a web of paranoia when he finds himself the target of a cyber conspiracy involving murderous schoolgirls and whether reality itself is what he thought it was. Plenty of gory murder to be had here, and the game was popular enough to be ported to the Xbox 360, the PSP and even got an anime adaptation that will be released in the US next year.

Now, I'm writing this without having played or read through any of the above titles since they are not available in the West or translated into English. However, dedicated fans in the manga/anime community have actually made English language patches for some of them to make them playable in English, though it's extremely hard to actually find the titles themselves. Ntiroplus has apparently formed a US division to bring official translations over by this autumn. God knows how its mixture of genre and tits is going to go down. I don't even know what kind of sales figures would merit a success for them to continue selling titles in the US.

What interests me about visual novels is their potential as a storytelling medium, the way they have words and images play off each other to create an emotional effect. Music and sound effects, even voices acting out the dialogue – fi you have the budget for it – would be an added plus. I'd really like to what American or British creators might do with it, but then there's no market in the West for that right now. It would probably take a high-profile writer collaborating with an interesting artist, and for it to be promoted properly to make any real splash. Now that I think about it, Chris Marker's LA JETEE could be called a visual novel of a sort, perhaps one of the earliest examples, in the days before personal computers.

La Jetée in full:

But still, there are interesting stories being told in Japan's visual novels, including some that actively subvert the trends of otaku obsessions, and I'll be talking about them in the next two weeks.

Clicking-clicking-clicking away at

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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