- Jun 4, 2022
- 284
- 2,102
I am relatively new to the whole genre of VNs. I do (usually) enjoy the romance aspect of AAA video games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age etc) and started to look into games that are more focused on the romance aspect. So I came across VNs... I have read / played maybe 60 (western style) VNs by now, most of them highly rated and while there are some true gems with strong stories and great characters many times I feel that VNs are seriously hurt by how they are financed and produced.
The typical VN seems to be something that is meant to generate income on Patreon or similar platforms, which is of course absolutely legitimate. Most VNs are also released piecemeal and often months go by between updates. And it seems the typical VN audience is very bad when it comes to delayed gratification, i.e. I get the feeling many people who consume VNs want sex to happen as soon as possible, with as many women (or men) as possible and as often as possible, instead of getting truly meaningful scenes with a compelling love interest later into the story, when it makes sense.
So devs are heavily encouraged to offer just that, instant gratification, at the end of the day a dev should aim to please the audience, it's their money after all.
But this, in return, seems to result in your average VN that has a) very implausible scenarios (so you can have sex five minutes into the story) and/or b) a main narrative, main romance that is made meaningless, shallow and pointless because the MC fools around with a dozen other females. Which can make confessions like "I love you" or "You are my only one" rather silly and disingenious because the MC says basically the same thing to everyone.
What I am getting at here is that I feel VNs are seriously hurt as an artform by audience expectations and how developers make and release their VNs. If the average VN was more like a traditional romance novel or movie 12 or 24 months may pass before serious action happens due to the slow release schedule of most VNs - and because many people seem to have severe issues with delayed gratification they would grow increasingly impatient and annoyed when nothing happens update after update and, even worse, there's only one love interest really and not your typical buffet of girls who all fall for you at the mere sight of you (the MC).
Thus a developer is incentivised to feature sex pretty early on, to add as many sidegirls as possible, but this in turn means that basically all relationships in a VN become perfunctory, trivial and rather shallow. Which is ok for certain genres maybe, like harem games or comedies / parodies, but the more story focused VNs can suffer greatly from this. And while solo routes are sometimes available it also means you are often locked out of a lot of content and each update may only offer very little for any particular route, turning the whole thing into a not so enjoyable experience.
I originally thought that VNs are meant to be much more like romance novels or movies, and not like your typical pornhub clip with some over the top plot tacked on to it. But it seems these VNs do really well whereas more traditional slow burn romances featuring only one or very few love interests aren't as popular. I cannot understand why people who skip all the dialogue in a VN just to get to the "scenes" don't just go to pornhub etc and why people expect VNs to be more about porn than a good story with believable interactions between characters.
So VNs are stuck in a place where devs need to keep their subscribers happy, this in turn dictates how a story is told (i.e. instant gratification it is, instead of the much better and more rewarding delayed gratification) and this ultimately results in so many VNs that are just a complete mess, where characters are silly tropes or mere sex toys that jump on the MC five minutes after meeting him and where the females in the game are more like Pokemon, meant to collect them all, instead of more lifelike characters with realistic motivations.
And the crowdfunded approach also results in so many VNs that add more and more elements, silly (side) plots as well as more and more love interests over the course of development, just to keep a project going, since it provides a steady income - instead of finishing a project and then to create something new.
So I do wonder if there is a way out of that vicious cycle. Maybe VNs (western style) are too much of a niche to become anything but subscriber financed projects with very small teams that simply don't have the means to release a VN in just a couple of major updates, think "Life is Strange" or the typical Telltale game? I feel that VNs could be so much better if audiences didn't expect sex scenes straight of the gate and devs had the courage - and the support by their subscribers! - to write a believable story with believable characters, which almost always would mean it's more of a slow burn and not a weird combination of some cheap 1980s sex comedy and Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather".
Or maybe VNs are just mislabeled and the "novel" part is a misnomer and it should be "VP" instead... "Visual Porn". But then again, don't we already have that with real people?
Of course my thoughts are based on the VNs I played and I entirely ignore Japanese games (don't like the artstyle and narrative, I tried a few), maybe there are lots of story driven realistic (western style) VNs out there I simply haven't heard of.
I wonder what other people are feeling about this and if I simply expect too much from VNs. I do enjoy quite a few of them of course (City of Broken Dreamers, Price of Power, Acting Lessons, Now & Then, Hayley's Story, Melody etc) and I do usually just speed run through all the silly bits when a VN has at least a compelling main love interest / story, but I wish speed running or ignoring large parts of a VN was not necessary and VNs were much more focused on the important parts, and didn't go off on silly or pointless tangents with unneeded side characters so many times.
The typical VN seems to be something that is meant to generate income on Patreon or similar platforms, which is of course absolutely legitimate. Most VNs are also released piecemeal and often months go by between updates. And it seems the typical VN audience is very bad when it comes to delayed gratification, i.e. I get the feeling many people who consume VNs want sex to happen as soon as possible, with as many women (or men) as possible and as often as possible, instead of getting truly meaningful scenes with a compelling love interest later into the story, when it makes sense.
So devs are heavily encouraged to offer just that, instant gratification, at the end of the day a dev should aim to please the audience, it's their money after all.
But this, in return, seems to result in your average VN that has a) very implausible scenarios (so you can have sex five minutes into the story) and/or b) a main narrative, main romance that is made meaningless, shallow and pointless because the MC fools around with a dozen other females. Which can make confessions like "I love you" or "You are my only one" rather silly and disingenious because the MC says basically the same thing to everyone.
What I am getting at here is that I feel VNs are seriously hurt as an artform by audience expectations and how developers make and release their VNs. If the average VN was more like a traditional romance novel or movie 12 or 24 months may pass before serious action happens due to the slow release schedule of most VNs - and because many people seem to have severe issues with delayed gratification they would grow increasingly impatient and annoyed when nothing happens update after update and, even worse, there's only one love interest really and not your typical buffet of girls who all fall for you at the mere sight of you (the MC).
Thus a developer is incentivised to feature sex pretty early on, to add as many sidegirls as possible, but this in turn means that basically all relationships in a VN become perfunctory, trivial and rather shallow. Which is ok for certain genres maybe, like harem games or comedies / parodies, but the more story focused VNs can suffer greatly from this. And while solo routes are sometimes available it also means you are often locked out of a lot of content and each update may only offer very little for any particular route, turning the whole thing into a not so enjoyable experience.
I originally thought that VNs are meant to be much more like romance novels or movies, and not like your typical pornhub clip with some over the top plot tacked on to it. But it seems these VNs do really well whereas more traditional slow burn romances featuring only one or very few love interests aren't as popular. I cannot understand why people who skip all the dialogue in a VN just to get to the "scenes" don't just go to pornhub etc and why people expect VNs to be more about porn than a good story with believable interactions between characters.
So VNs are stuck in a place where devs need to keep their subscribers happy, this in turn dictates how a story is told (i.e. instant gratification it is, instead of the much better and more rewarding delayed gratification) and this ultimately results in so many VNs that are just a complete mess, where characters are silly tropes or mere sex toys that jump on the MC five minutes after meeting him and where the females in the game are more like Pokemon, meant to collect them all, instead of more lifelike characters with realistic motivations.
And the crowdfunded approach also results in so many VNs that add more and more elements, silly (side) plots as well as more and more love interests over the course of development, just to keep a project going, since it provides a steady income - instead of finishing a project and then to create something new.
So I do wonder if there is a way out of that vicious cycle. Maybe VNs (western style) are too much of a niche to become anything but subscriber financed projects with very small teams that simply don't have the means to release a VN in just a couple of major updates, think "Life is Strange" or the typical Telltale game? I feel that VNs could be so much better if audiences didn't expect sex scenes straight of the gate and devs had the courage - and the support by their subscribers! - to write a believable story with believable characters, which almost always would mean it's more of a slow burn and not a weird combination of some cheap 1980s sex comedy and Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather".
Or maybe VNs are just mislabeled and the "novel" part is a misnomer and it should be "VP" instead... "Visual Porn". But then again, don't we already have that with real people?
Of course my thoughts are based on the VNs I played and I entirely ignore Japanese games (don't like the artstyle and narrative, I tried a few), maybe there are lots of story driven realistic (western style) VNs out there I simply haven't heard of.
I wonder what other people are feeling about this and if I simply expect too much from VNs. I do enjoy quite a few of them of course (City of Broken Dreamers, Price of Power, Acting Lessons, Now & Then, Hayley's Story, Melody etc) and I do usually just speed run through all the silly bits when a VN has at least a compelling main love interest / story, but I wish speed running or ignoring large parts of a VN was not necessary and VNs were much more focused on the important parts, and didn't go off on silly or pointless tangents with unneeded side characters so many times.
