The video game industry comprises a variety of game genres, all of which have a steady and fairly large community surrounding them. However, there is one genre that has been relatively niche to read, despite being around since the 1980s: Visual Novels.
Visual novels, for those unaware, are interactive story-based games that typically combine static images with heavy text. They are considered to be a sort of spiritual successor to text adventures and other early text-based games that dominated the early games industry. That said, it was the 1983 game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which paved the way towards the format that modern visual novels have, despite that format finalizing years later in the 1990s.
Due to most of the early visual novels coming out of Japan, most of these games used anime-inspired graphics and images to tell their stories and often incorporated popular tropes from anime and manga in their games. Dating Simulators, a game where the player character has the chance to date several characters in a game with their own specific routes, became wildly popular in that genre’s scene.
This tie to anime culture was what led the visual novel genre to find little interest outside of Japan, aside from a small number of hardcore Western fans. That said, in recent years, visual novels have seen a rise in interest thanks to the internet. Never before have visual novels been as easily accessible to players outside of Japan, but they still haven’t fully broken into the mainstream like other video game genres.
Unfortunately, being such a text-heavy genre can keep a number of prospective players away. There is a sizable number of people who just don’t see visual novels as engaging, especially if they don’t quite care about storylines in video games. Additionally, the ongoing reading crisis within the United States could also mean that text-heavy games like visual novels will be harder for people to enjoy if their reading levels aren’t up to par.
However, there has been a success in combining the visual novel game mechanics in other game genres. Popular titles within the modern Fire Emblem franchise have shown that this strategy works wonders.
