Why I Don't Play Visual Novels

 

Hi, I’m Kaoru.

You may know me as one of the angriest people on Twitter.  One of the things that earned me this reputation was my public opposition to a little game that was all the rage among Twitter users in late 2020.  It’s called Muv-Luv.  You might know it, too.

Why was I so publicly opposed to this game?  Well, there are two reasons.  One was just simple stubbornness.  There was only so much of seeing this game everywhere and being called a subhuman for not wanting to play it that I could take before I dug in my heels and reaffirmed my desire to never touch the game or any media related to it.

The second reason was that I simply do not play visual novels.  And this is why.

If you’ve been on the internet as long as I have, especially when you are in circles related to Japanese media, you will inevitably run across visual novel fans, whether that is the growing Muv-Luv zoomer fandom, the Tsukihime boomers, the Umineko boomers, the Higurashi boomers, the old-school Fate elitists, you name it.  Their names, avatars, and things they talk about most often instantly betray them.  Usually, they are extremely insular, and their accounts carry faint hints of elitism- it seems that they devote themselves to their favorite visual novels in order to show that they are true weebs, unlike those filthy casuals who only watch anime.  Attempting to converse with one of these people is like attempting to speak a foreign language, as they will talk in references that only make sense to other fans of their favorite game.  I would encounter this frequently with my online friends as they became consumed by the virus known as Muv-Luv.  A typical evening would go something like this.

Kaoru: Hey, evening.

Friend: Hi!

Kaoru: So did you hear about the new-

Friend 2: TWIZZLERS!

Kaoru: What?

Friend 3: TWIZZLERS!  Play Alternative!

Kaoru: I don’t get it.

Friend: Sumika or Meiya?

Kaoru: Who even are these people?

Friend 2: He’s asking you Sumika or Meiya.  It’s not that difficult.

Kaoru: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Friend: It’s Alternative, you pleb!  Sumika or Meiya, pick one now!

(chat devolves into a cacophony as everyone in it screams their reference of choice louder and louder)

At the time that the Muv-Luv craze was sweeping my friend circle, I already had issues with being friends with a group that was incredibly knowledgeable about something that I wasn’t, and feeling both lost and idiotic when they started talking about it.  So you can imagine how it felt when I went from one group that had scholarly debates about the color of Josef Stalin’s bowel movements to another group only to find the discussion centered around nothing but referencing this work of fiction I don’t know anything about.

This was my personal experience with visual novel fans, but it seems like this seems to be a common theme.  Maybe some of you have had similar experiences.  Of course, if you are a Muv-Luv fan, you’re probably extremely pissed that I decided not to read the greatest work of fiction of all time.  But you’ve also probably tuned out by this point.  So I will continue.

Why do visual novels attract these kinds of people, and what’s the issue for my opposition to them?  Well, there are a few reasons.  The most important issue here is the length.  VNDB.com is a site that catalogues and classifies visual novels and allows users to post which ones they’re currently playing and have completed.  One of its statistics is an estimate of the time required to complete a visual novel.  It’s not an exact number or average, but it’s still a useful statistic.  Let’s just take the bane of my existence, Muv-Luv, as an example.  VNDB says that Muv-Luv Extra and Unlimited together take 30-50 hours to play.  Let’s assume that you’re a fast reader, and finish it in exactly 30.  However, we’re not done here.  VNDB says that Muv-Luv Alternative takes over 50 hours to play, so let’s assume you’re still a fast reader, and finish it in 50 hours.  Together, that’s 80 hours of gameplay.  That’s already a pretty big number…but we’re still not done.  Assuming that playing all of this made you a fan, now you want to go back and play the side stories!  The four Muv-Luv Alternative Chronicles VNs take up 30 hours.  Muv-Luv Photonflowers takes 10.  Muv-Luv Photonmelodies takes 30.  You even play the VN versions of Total Eclipse (30 hours) and Schwarzesmarken (10 hours).  In total, you’re looking at 190 hours of gameplay for the entire Muv-Luv franchise.

Now, let’s assume you’re not a NEET, and you’re also like me, where 4 hours is the upper limit of free time you have each day.  Assuming you play every day, playing through just Extra, Unlimited, and Alternative would take you 20 days.  If you decide to play everything, it would take you 47.5 days to complete the entire franchise.  That’s almost 2 months, devoting all your free time just to playing Muv-Luv.  And keep in mind, this is assuming you read as fast as possible- if you read more slowly, or can’t keep focus for 4 hours, then this would likely take even longer.

Now, you’re probably asking yourself why this is so big of a deal- after all, aren’t a lot of games long?  I’m no stranger to games taking a while- it took me 85 or so hours to beat Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I’m about 40 hours into Persona 4 Golden and barely even at the halfway point.   But the key point here is that these are not games, at least not as you’d understand them.

The two different forms of media are passive and active media.  Passive media are books, movies, anime, basically anything where you sit back and watch the action unfold.  In active media, which include tabletop games and video games, you, the player, control the action and what happens.  How the story unfolds is up to you.

What do visual novels count as?  Well…let’s take a look at the gameplay…which is just making an occasional dialogue choice that may cause the story to change.  I suppose that is active.  But most of the time is spent watching to see how the story plays out.  About the only gameplay here is deciding whether you want to click the mouse to move on to the next line of dialogue manually.  That hardly seems like the most interactive experience, does it?  Sometimes there’s not even any dialogue choices at all (these are called kinetic novels).

Some tell me I miss the point, and that I should be comparing visual novels to books instead of games.  Well, let’s consider that, too.

One Piece is, bar none, the most well-known manga in the world.  It’s been running since 1997, which is longer than I’ve been alive.  Currently, it has 99 published volumes.  I read one volume in about 30 minutes, but it may take longer for you.  I’m just going to use this as my baseline.  Let’s assume it takes you 40 minutes to finish, being conservative.

99 segments of 40 minutes equals exactly 66 hours.

You could read 23 years’ worth of one of the most popular manga in the world, one that never took a week off, and still have time to spare, in the time it takes for you just to play the Muv-Luv trilogy.

Or, if you want to compare it to actual print books, War and Peace is one of the longest novels ever written.  If you read at 250 words per minute, an average rate, it will take you about 39 hours to finish this book.  That is LESS time than just Alternative itself.  In the time it takes you to play through Muv-Luv, you can read War and Peace twice.

What if you’re a big fan of movies?  Let’s say that you’re such a fan of Star Wars that you want to watch all of them, even the sequel trilogy and the spinoffs.  I wouldn’t recommend them, because they’re poorly-written, pandering drivel.  To put it shortly, they suck.  But that’s beside the point.  Choosing to watch all of them would take 25 hours and 7 minutes.  That’s less time than just Extra and Unlimited ALONE.  Depending on how fast you read, you would at least be able to watch every Star Wars movie three times in the time it takes you to play Muv-Luv, possibly even four.

Are these works of fiction games, or books?  The fact that they’re sold on game platforms with the $60 price tag to match would suggest a game, but the lack of interactivity would suggest a book.  Regardless, the point here is that these series are massive time investments.  That’s the biggest issue.

This sort of time investment is poison to someone like me.  I like to consume many different kinds of media from many different genres in order to broaden my knowledge and ultimately learn more about the medium in the hopes of maybe becoming part of the creative industry later in my life.  As a child, I read voraciously, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on.  As an adult, I watch, read, and review all sorts of anime and manga.  These series are perfect for my mindset.  It takes 2-4 hours to watch one 11-13 episode cour of anime, something I can easily do every day.  It’s entirely possible for me to watch every anime series every single year and end up none the worse for it.  With manga, even though I do read longer series, I won’t get started with them unless I’ve already watched the anime first and liked it.  It’s a time investment that I can’t get back if I don’t enjoy it.  Doing something like that is quite frankly impossible with visual novels.  With them, considering the length, it would be lucky if I completed 10 or more a year.  And that’s the point I’m trying to make.  To me, visual novels are time sinks that I just can’t feel good about playing.  I’ll feel nothing but guilty about realizing I just spent 80 hours of my time watching text scroll on the screen no matter how good of a story it was.

Why can’t I stomach VNs taking this long, but why am I okay with games doing so?  The difference is, again, in passive and active media.  With a game, I’m more invested in playing it.  I can make my own experience every time I choose to play.  I’m not spending time obsessing over the minutiae of the plot, because I’m busy focusing on the game itself.  When it comes to passive media, I analyze every single bit of it.  That’s the difference between the mindset of a critic, and that of a fan.  When I play video games, I play them as a fan.  When I’m watching anime, reading manga, or reading books, I can’t help but view them as a critic.  It’s just how my brain is wired.

It’s pretty clear that the vast majority of visual novel readers, like the ones I mentioned previously, don’t view their favorite VNs from the mindset of a critic.  All too often I’ve spoke with people who say that Muv-Luv is the first visual novel they played, and it will be the only one they’ll ever play.  Or Higurashi.  Or Clannad.  Or whatever their favorite is, you get the picture.

The sheer commitment it takes just to get through one visual novel enforces this mindset kind of by necessity.  Just take a look at the list of top-rated visual novels on VNDB.

Nostalgia fuel is not exactly something exclusive to visual novels, but it’s something to take note of here.  Out of the top 50 visual novels in this database, 23 of them were made within the last 10 years, and 27 were made before.  This is a pretty reasonable number.  However, when we drop it down to VNs made within the past five years, we see…seven total.  In just three months, that number will drop to three.

What are these five VNs that, even though they were released recently, managed to ascend to greatness?

Utawarerumono: Futari no Hakuoro (2016): the third and final chapter to a series started in 2002.

9 -Nine- Yukiiro Yukihana Yukinoato (2020): the fourth chapter of a series that started in 2017.

Summer Pockets (2018): a stand-alone story that is produced by the famed Key Visual Arts.

Collar x Malice (2016): an original otome game.

Koshotengai no Hashihime (2016): an original BL game.

Kin'iro Loveriche (2017): an original dating sim.

Rance 10 (2018)…yeah, we’re not going to talk about that.

If we further eliminate the series that rely on established franchises to sell, we are left with a total of three completely original VNs made in the last five years that make it onto this list, and in three months there will be just one.

Just looking at the ratings doesn’t give the full story here.  Along with the rating, there’s also a popularity score, which on a scale of 0-100 measures how many users actually played the game.  Muv-Luv Alternative scores a 67.17.  The three games I mentioned score a combined 17.02.

Is this a sign of a decaying industry?  No, it actually makes perfect sense to me, considering what I mentioned about these games above.  They are huge time investments, and not only that, they are also massive money investments.  Why would someone pay $60 and take 40 hours to play a VN he knows nothing about over investing that same amount of time and money into an entry from a franchise he already knows he likes?  The visual novel as a medium almost seems tailor-made to ensure fans have no incentive to branch out beyond their one favorite series, or any ability to do so even if they wanted to. 

The sheer length of visual novels makes them inherently bad options to try to adapt to other forms of media.  Even if one was short, the branching narratives make them even harder to adapt.  You often see this with anime that tries to adapt a VN.  Most of the time, these shows end up being nothing more than 12-episode commercials that don’t even make any sense to those that haven’t already played the games.  This all but ensures that people who don’t already know what the anime is adapting aren’t going to come check it out, and this further makes VNs and the fanbases surrounding them even more insular.  I completely understand not wanting to have your fandom diluted by secondaries that have no respect for the original source material- but there are also many people like me who become fans of the original work because we saw the adaptation first and liked it.  That’s not going to happen when I can count on one hand the anime adaptations of VNs that managed to be coherent let alone good fiction in their own right.  The lack of incoming secondaries means that the VN fanbases will stay consistently small, but they also grow more and more insular, self-referential, and disconnected from both each other and the wider Japanese media world as a whole.

All the problems I have with visual novels can be boiled down to one core issue: the time you have to invest.  This, paradoxically, is how a game genre with one of the lowest barriers to creation ends up being one with one of the highest barriers to fans.  It takes a certain type of person to be able to play a VN, one that can stare at a screen with laser focus for hours on end.  This type of person is also far more likely to obsess over minute details of his favorite series instead of getting into other ones.  I, unfortunately, am not this type of person.  The visual novel industry ends up favoring these fans just by the very nature of the games that I’ve outlined above.  It has proven itself to be a sustainable model.  One thing you’ll notice that I haven’t said is that the insularity of visual novels is a bad thing.  I don’t believe so.  There is nothing worse than a creator catering to the johnny-come-latelys of a fandom that have zero respect for the work itself or the fans that have been there from the beginning.  So to everyone who already does play visual novels: keep doing what you’re doing.  Even if your fanbases are small, even if you’ve only ever played one, even if you devote all your waking hours to playing, keep playing them.  Unfortunately, as I’ve outlined above, I’m just not wired the right way to be able to enjoy visual novels.

And I am content with that.