No, outside Japan there aren’t any AAA-commercial quality visual novel games, of course. BUT – and it’s sa big but, the visual novel elements are starting to pour into the normal AAA genres. Some examples? Mass Effect, The Witcher, and probably more I haven’t played.<\/p>\n
Ok, but why you say this? What exactly defines a visual novel, and differentiate it from a normal RPG game? Well in the cases above is really difficult, but I think I could say that while RPGs had NPC and quests already as a feature, the way those two games present the dialogues and the choices makes them much more close to visual novel than other games. Indeed, there aren’t simply quests: first, there is LOT of dialogue. Those games are fully voiced (well, like all my future ones) so that helps a lot. Many people don’t like when there’s much text to read, but if you present the same text under the form of a movie\/cartoon, with moving actors, scenes and voices, it’s VERY different (in practice is the difference between reading a book or watching a tv movie). In those games, there are MANY choices. Both on Mass Effect and The Witcher you can influence lots of characters\/factions, and in the end, really change your ending.<\/p>\n
RPGs always had the possibility to make choices, but to influence the world\/characters around you and “unlock” different endings? No, that’s more a visual novel thing, to me \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
Both those games were huge successes, selling million of copies. Of course, it’s not JUST because of the visual novel component: but I like to think that it played a big role. Yes, you can have visual novels features in a AAA game and not bore the western gaming public: you just need to insert them into a context with many other gameplay types (shooters, strategy, simulations). That’s what I’m going to do with The Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No, outside Japan there aren’t any AAA-commercial quality visual novel games, of course. BUT – and it’s sa big but, the visual novel elements are starting to pour into the normal AAA genres. Some examples? Mass Effect, The Witcher, and probably more I haven’t played. Ok, but why you say this? What exactly defines a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,26,18,21],"tags":[87],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dating-sims","category-other-games","category-planet-stronghold","category-strategy-games","category-the-flower-shop","tag-visual-novels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}