Well, and secondly, and that's nitpicky as fuck, the developer likes to describe redundant things. For example "She reaches down and picks up her glasses". That's something you do when writing a book, but in an AVN you literally get to see it happening... No need for telling your audience. I'd scratch all of that tbh...
Granted, "She reaches down and picks up her glasses" isn't very compelling storytelling. But, if your meta point is that VNs should just be dialog and images, then I disagree with it.
First, most VNs aren't all that visual. The majority of them have static backgrounds and waist up character overlays with 5 or 6 expression differences. Not a lot of storytelling potential there.
Second, if unadorned dialog was sufficient, then we wouldn't need skilled actors for our movies.
Consider the following two variants:
Background: A hotel lobby.
Character overlay 1: An older woman who's still hot. She's got a neutral expression and is not wearing glasses.
Overlay 2: Same woman, wearing glasses and smiling now.
Variant 1:
(Lobby with overlay 1)
[You] Excuse me, miss. I'm looking for someone.
[Her] Just a second, sugar.
(Switch to overlay 2)
[Her] Well, well, well. Maybe you found her.
Variant 2:
(Lobby with overlay 1)
You're supposed to meet your blind date in the hotel lobby, but the woman you find there is older than you expect. You approach her and say timidly, "Excuse me, miss. I'm looking for someone."
She squints a bit as she turns her gaze to you. With a slight shake of her head, she says, "Just a second, sugar."
Without taking her eyes off of you, she plucks a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from the table beside her and puts them on.
(Switch to overlay 2)
You see hunger in the woman's eyes as she assesses you like a piece of meat. Longingly, she says, "Well, well, well. Maybe you found her."
I'll argue that Variant 2 has more story, or, at the very least, more characterization.
A visual novel is still a text-based storytelling medium. If you hid the text and only looked at the images, you'd get little to nothing of the story. The images certainly enhance the text, but they don't replace it.
This would change with great voice actors, but none of us can afford them. ArianeB is starting to work with AI voiceovers though. I'll be interested in seeing where that goes.
Tlaero