AI visual novels with a realistic style?

marcos88

Newbie
Apr 17, 2018
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I might be mistaken, but most visual novels I’ve seen tend to use semi-realistic, 3D, or cartoon-like aesthetics.
With the rise of AI tools, I expected to see more visual novels featuring characters that look truly realistic, yet I can’t remember encountering any.

What do you think the reasons might be? Do people simply prefer unrealistic visual styles? Could there be potential legal or ethical issues that make developers avoid realistic AI-generated characters?

I wanted to create one myself, but now I’m starting to have doubts.
 
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SM6B2

New Member
May 22, 2022
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In my opinion, realistic AI images don’t look very good. I would encourage you to go to Civitai and scroll through the image section for men and women, and look for realistic images. They all look the same mostly portrait shots with lighting from the left or right, featuring a plain expression or an uncanny smile. Everyone has perfect skin and dead eyes.

Another problem, specifically with men, is that they often look very strange some kind of mix between hypermasculine and androgynous features, which is very off-putting.

Image consistency is also much harder to achieve with realistic images. A slight deviation can make a character almost unrecognizable as the same person, while cartoonish characters don’t suffer from this nearly as much.

Lastly, I would say that cartoonish characters are easier to transform into dynamic poses while still maintaining high image consistency, whereas realistic characters often end up looking out of place, or disfigured. Humans are simply very good at recognizing how other humans should look, and for realistic AI images we aren’t there yet, unless you want to spend ten times the effort on a single image compared to a cartoonish version.
 

olaf_yaddax

Active Member
Oct 18, 2025
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I think we need a very powerful computer to make a realistic AI game. If that weren't the case, most people would prefer this over cartoon-style graphics because there are truly very realistic AI images. Sometimes I can't tell the difference between the real thing and the fake.
 

Goeffel

Well-Known Member
Sep 10, 2022
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what SM6B2 said

additionally:
but most visual novels I’ve seen
if this means "seen on f95zone" then new-ish rules should add to the effect.
Depiction of realistic AI teenagers in sexual context are forbidden now. I do not know to what extent, where the line is drawn for "too realistic" to start, but the rule is there and applied.
But typically many games / VNs will want to have juveniles or very young adults, so f95zone should have less of realistic-AI-games/VNs than there are out there.

[...] most people would prefer this over cartoon-style graphics because there are truly very realistic AI images.
no.





probably
 
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