Visual Novels

Screenshots taken from : EF - The First Tale

Visual novels are interactive fictions games usually in high-end anime graphics. Mistaken for dating sims, it is classified under a sub-genre for adventure games. They are extremely popular in Japan and makes up a huge percentage of sales under PC games. Sometimes, they are imported to the PS2 of dreamcast.

Very little gameplay is involved, as the mouse is just used for clicking the text and choosing the actions. Different actions lead to different storylines, and endings. Sound-wise and graphic-wise is usually very good, as the whole game is voice-casted. However, most of these visual novels are M18+, although they are supposed to cater for all ages.

What people look for in the game is the storyline, length of gameplay, and the number of endings. For a weird reason, these games are not known in other countries, that is why there are no translations for these games. However, there are programs that enable the japanese text to be translated in to other languages.

Usually going at 5000++ yen, these do not come cheap, but the people are willing to pay for some reason :D (probably the mature scenes) The only few ones that have no mature content are probably Air, Ai Yori Aoshi, Fate! Stay Night, and other anime related ones.

Im drilling on and on..what for? Until I can find these games over here, and totally understand the language, I will most probably not be touching these any time.