5/16/2023 0 Comments Ace academy game forums![]() There are other Japanese adventure games released before this, most of which were clones of Mystery House, but Portopia, specifically the more popular 1985 Famicom port, is the title that in many ways created the modern adventure game in Japan and would start many traditions and conventions that other Japanese developers would copy. A prototypical crime story, Portopia has the player take the role of a detective investigating a murder with the assistance of another detective named Yasu. Just like how the origin of JRPGs can be traced back to Yuji Horii’s Dragon Quest series, Japanese adventure games can basically be traced back to another Yuji Horii title, 1983’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case. However, after this point, the two regions went down different paths with the genre. Both have their origins in text adventure games (like Zork, Deadline and other Infocom titles) and both were heavily influenced by Roberta Williams’ Mystery House, which was popular in Japan and in the West. There are western adventure games and Japanese adventure games. Just like how most fans classify games like The Elder Scrolls series as “Western RPGs” and titles like Final Fantasy as “Japanese RPGs” or “JRPGs” it will be helpful to think of adventure games in the same way. Visual novels don’t look anything like the classical western definition of an adventure game, which includes point-and-click titles like Maniac Mansion or modern games like those once released by Telltale, but if you look at the history of adventure games in Japan it makes a lot more sense. It is basically like how action-RPGs and turn-based RPGs are both still role-playing games, visual novels are just a branch of the larger family tree of Japanese adventure games. But I’ll do my best.įirst thing to understand is that all visual novels are adventure games. Bear in mind that I do not know Japanese, therefore I cannot really play most of these games, and a lot of what I know has been figured out by Google translating my way through Japanese wiki sites and picking up stuff from random sources over the years. So, I wanted to try and clear some things up about visual novels by looking at their history and their relationship to adventure games. I think a lot of the misunderstandings behind what a visual novel is has a lot to do with the lack of English translations for many of the games that lead to the genre’s creation, causing a lot of confusion and misinformation. The visual novel genre originates in Japan and has a long history that is directly connected to the Japanese adventure genre, all of which are deeply locked away behind a thick language barrier. Sort of like when a little kid learns a new word and starts wanting to use it on everything. Pretty much any Japanese game that is heavily story based and is mainly presented through character portraits and textboxes is being labeled a visual novel in the West. I’ve even seen some people call games like Persona 5 a visual novel with RPG elements. Games that were once correctly classified as “adventure games”, like Ace Attorney or Hotel Dusk, are now being called visual novels or visual novel adventure games or even “visual novels with point-and-click elements”. With this surge in popularity both fans and critics have begun throwing the term “visual novel” around all over the place to classify basically anything that bares a surface level similarity to the genre, especially if they are Japanese in origin. Today visual novels occupy a sizable niche within the western gaming community with all sorts of titles, both from Japan and by western developers, available on popular storefronts like Steam. I am certainly one of those people because while I had dabbled with visual novels like Ever17, which I played right after experiencing 999 around 2010-ish, I only started to read more visual novels after playing Katawa Shoujo, which made me more aware of the genre. ![]() If I had to be exact, I’d say a majority of English speaking players had only been vaguely aware, or completely unaware, of the word “visual novel” until maybe Januwhen the English freeware game called Katawa Shoujo hit the scene and made many people fans of the genre (at least that is the impression I get from reading around the internet on sites like the visual novel sub-Reddit). ![]() I feel like the term “visual novel” is fairly new for a lot of western game fans.
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