Visual Novel Is a Game Mechanic

One thing I've never quite understood, and I'll admit that this is me as an outsider looking in despite literally being in this industry and this particular corner of the industry for five years... is why visual novel is looked at as a genre instead of a game mechanic.

It feels limiting to call it an entire genre, with its own set of absolute expectations and limits and traditions. In essence, this is a game mechanic. And it's been applied in so many different contexts beyond your standard stereotypical Japanese dating sim. You can see this game mechanic of advancing through dialogue and making choices which branch the plot in so many different games! I mean let's be honest, mass effect is a cover-based dating simulator. The walking dead is a visual novel despite using 3-D graphics. There's just so much room to maneuver here if you look beyond those expectations.

Let me give you an example. This is a game that I was playing recently and absolutely fell in love with, and I would absolutely recommend to anyone who has ever played the secret of monkey Island or papers please.

This is L'il Guardsman.

It's basically a perfect fusion of both, with gameplay mechanics around investigation and intuition, blended with visual novel style choices and even some point and click walking around. If you boil everything down completely, it's still a visual novel at heart.

The character writing is excellent, the voice acting is terrific, the plot is engaging, everything about it just screams high-quality design and thoughtful writing.

Despite the robust interface there, this really focuses in on trying to understand people through conversations and making judgment calls. The plot branches based on your decisions. If that's not a visual novel mechanic I'll eat my hat.

Even the sections where you walk around on foot like a traditional point and click adventure are really just simple wrappers around additional dialogue and decisions.

All of this blended together makes for a rich pastiche of different gameplay styles that will be innately familiar to anyone who enjoys visual novels. I would love to see games like this explored, taken on their own terms as narrative games, without any other preconceptions.

My next game, the shadow over cyberspace, follows some of these ideas. You can explore your house, there are things to click on, there are different interfaces to engage with. The core is still talking to people and making decisions but there's so much surrounding it that I almost hesitate to call it a visual novel because I feel that's a mechanic, not a genre.

But I do, on the other hand, understand the need for simple and easy to grasp handles for marketing purposes. That you can more easily reach an audience if you give them a simple two word statement that they can relate to.

So whatever you call it, try to keep a wide perspective as to what these games can be. And check out L'il Guardsman if you can, it's just delightful.