Trigger warning: feels

Two visual novel -related events converged upon my life in the same week, by coincidence, and the combined effect made me kind of sad. First, I read an interview of the lead producer of the visual novel studio minori which painted a gloomy picture of the state of the VN industry. Second, I read a visual novel, for the first time in a couple of years, Rewrite from KEY. I quit reading VNs because it didn’t feel worthwhile, and while I didn’t expect Rewrite to rekindle my interest even in the best case, it was just a bad experience that reinforced my views of the dismal state of the medium.

Why are VNs in trouble? It’s a young medium, which is always brought up in these discussions, with the implication of a brighter future once some unspecified “maturing” happens. However, instead of expanding its horizons, the industry seems to be retreating further and further into its comfort zone, a niche inside the otaku cultural niche. I can’t help but feeling that this is a major reason for why instead of expanding, the industry is shrinking, even dying. The countermeasure, to try to appeal to other audiences, is risky. Who would be willing to do that? Nobody with a lot of money on the line. Like Sakai says in the interview, independent creators have more power than ever before (this same effect is happening in western game industry as well), so maybe they are the force that could breathe life in visual novels.

That brings me to the case of me ascertaining the sad state of VN industry first hand. In short, Rewrite was a badly made, subpar VN.

The script reads like something written by a 15 year old (and this is without taking the sketchy translation into account, that’s a whole another story (it’s also not a dig at actual 15 year olds)). The game is clumsily trying to convey deep and serious themes of environmentalism and personal responsibility, and towards the end has quite a few dramatic, tense, and even tragic moments, Yet it spends the first 8-9 hours of its length for zany highschool hijinks and stupid comedy that amount to fuck all in the end, except creating a jarring disjointedness in the mood of the story. There are a few good things in the later stages, but they drown in the sea of subpar writing most of the script is. Further, the production overall is incredibly low effort. There’s not even close enough art (significant characters have no art assets, amateurish quality, frequent bouts of text on black screen), and what little assets the game has it usually uses for the most banal shit it can, for no reason. The game feels like a first attempt at making a VN by some guys still learning their stuff, not a high-profile release by some of the most acclaimed creators in the entire industry.

This is not how you write prose after you turn 16

While reading Rewrite, I didn’t hide my suffering from the public. People on Twitter and IRC responded to my screencaps of Rewrite’s finest moments with concerns of my mental health, and messages like “It’s ok to quit” and “Why are you reading this?”. They have a point. I shouldn’t want to waste my time in reading visual novels, as they currently are. They don’t justify the time investment in the least. I could’ve read a couple of good books in the time I spent on Rewrite, or if I wanted some entertainment, I could watch a 25 minute comedy anime episode for the same value I got out of of the VN.

What I want, basically, is a visual novel your mom would like. Maybe not your actual mom, but someone who doesn’t have any interest in dealing with juvenile idiocy, otaku culture, low-brow comedy and characters made to fill archetype quotas in their literature. I’ve written about this previously (years ago) on the Katawa Shoujo development blog, and the basic principles stand. It’s fine to have trashy VNs, or VNs appealing to some specific audience, every other art medium has these too. The problem is that VNs are almost completely stuck in certain genre and production conventions that make them utterly unappealing to people not predisposed to liking them.

Now that I’m not bound to Katawa Shoujo anymore (which, by the way, embodies many of the traits I dislike), attempting to make something like that myself is an option and, I suppose, the logical step forward. Whether I can, or have the will to pull through… well, I don’t know even myself.