Forum:
Hello welcome to my guide on how to get started with the wonderful world of Visual Novels. This is the all ages version of the guide. Most visual novels are classified as All Ages or 18+ so I will do the same. This is to ensure this fourm is accessible to people of all age groups. Now let's get started.
Getting into visual novels may seem like a daunting task, and it sure can be, but I am writing this guide to help you on your journey. First let me explain what a visual novel is. A visual novel is a type of game that originated in japan. It was an offshoot of text heavy adventure games. Visual novels contain large amounts of text and rely heavily, or entirely on its story. That's what the name comes from. It is usually a novel accompanied by Visuals, Music, sounds and quite often voice acting. Visual novels in this format include clannad, steins gate, and more. There is also a lot of discussion you may have heard around hybrid visual novels. These, as the name suggests, are half visual novel and half something else. This is usually used to describe JRPG's that have heavy story content and elements of visual novels such as dating and friendship ranking that is essential to the core mechanics. Popular games in this category are the persona series, star ocean and other similar games, and basically anything published by spike chunsoft.
So here are my (all ages) recommendations for beginners.
Note some visual novels are all ages but are originally adult oriented games and that content can be restored with mods. For the sake of simplicity I will only include these if 1. It is entirely removed in modern releases and 2. Isn't essential to the plot.
Clannad.
It's a classic visual novel with all the tropes both good and bad. You may have watched the anime as it's quite popular. While mostly faithful the pacing in earlier parts is messed up. The story follows Tomoya Okazaki who long story short has lived a semi-secluded life due to his complex family situation and he becomes a slack off at school. Through the many different routs he finds himself caring about other people and it reflects on him in a way that improves himself. This is a great visual novel but is quite long. It takes about 70 hours and 10 routes to unlock the after story segment you may have heard about.
Steins Gate.
It's been a while since I've read this one but it's another that's received a heavily adored anime adaption. From what I remember it follows a scientist who discovers time travel and finds out that he prevented the death of another female scientist. Sorry for the brief description I can't remember .
. Spike Chunsoft games.
Spike chunsoft is a game studio that has perfected the hybrid format. Games such as Zanki Zero, Danganronpa, and Ai the somnium files are all great examples of the studio. Their games are very accessible nowadays and are more games than the others mentioned.
Okay so this is the hard part of recommending visual novels is that nearly all the great visual novels have some form of adult content and I can't recommend them in this part of the guide. This isn't just eroge some of the greatest stories told I'm Visual novels contain adult content. If your comfortable with some minor adult content the next part will be your best bet. I would like to just say not all of it is trash fetishist stuff and the adult content usually is minor.
Report Topic
