hello! just to spark conversations…does anyone like visual novels?
I’m loving this chill and beautiful 1996 scifi VN called “YU-NO”…amazing music too!
this classic was for PC-98 (a pioneer in many ways, it paved the way for others like Steins;Gate)
with Sega Saturn and Windows releases soon after (and fantranslated in english for PC),
but there is also a 2019 officially translated remake for Steam/PC, PS4, and Nintendo Switch
sad that the creator and composer both passed away…they had such a groundbreaking vision…
I end up getting a fair few visual novels on sale; once in a while I take a look at one of the $30/$60 ones and have a hard time justifying the purchase, since I rarely finish them.
It’s just hard for any of them to hook me with a premise anymore. So much of Japanese writing seems to follow a network of dramatized tropes - even though it’s very likely I’m missing some good ones out there.
Way more replies in the .ml version of this thread: lemmy.ml/post/1128022
(This was posted from https://old.lemmy.world/post/348 )
I don’t play a lot of visual novels but did enjoy the 999 trilogy. The first game has 9 people who wake up on a boat that is sinking and they have to solve puzzles to escape and solve the mystery of why they have been kidnapped and forced to play a death game.
I felt the puzzle segments helped with the pacing and as someone who can’t really stick with VN’s I’d suggest this to people who aren’t a fan of the genre, as well as those who are. A remaster is available on PC/PS/Xbox which has the first two games in the series and it goes on sale pretty often.
Another great series by the same developer is the AI Somnium files series. It’s a detective game where you and your AI partner try to solve a series of murders.
Both excellent and have a good mix of VN content and gameplay.
I see your typical recommendations and I approve 100% of them. Somnium proved to me that Uchikoshi really just needed a fresh slate when making a game and that ZTD’s problems could have been circumvented outside of a serialized situation (and maybe less throwing shit at the wall to explain some of the magic-science).
But if anyone here is curious about Visual Novels of this type (mystery/horror/psychological/TWISTS), then I want to make a less-known recommendation for Paranormasight: The seven mysteries of Honjo. This game came out of nowhere this year, and made a solid first impression for what appears will be an on-going series.
It’s very ‘gateway’ for the genre, in that it’s probably not going to be anyone’s favorite, and there’s elements of it you’ll compare it unfavorably versus other titles. Example: It has a fair bit of ‘downtime’ on the horror elements, which can’t be understated when you’re there in the moment and is something that doesn’t happen with much older titles like 999 and makes those masterpieces. But overall, I found it amazing how well Square Enix hit it off with their first attempt. Characters are good, there’s a lot of screwballs who turn murderous or tame when pressured, dialogue is pretty good too, you hardly ever get stuck and the game leans on you if you do anyways, and the “oh shit” moments hit the par. Like, some of the stuff the Narrator does is genuinely mindblowing if you’re new to this, although it’s likely that Doki Doki Literature Club already got most of the internet on guard. But not on the whole, other moments are narrative dependent and you may be left wondering the meaning of even if you’re savvy (such as the narrator’s question at the end of the tutorial segment, I’ve seen 999-experts be thrown off-guard by it and go on huge theorycrafting tangents).
