From In-Portal Developers Guide

Visual Novels - A Beginner's Help guide to a Genre of Game

Under western culture, we have been familiar to videogame genres like first-person shooters, console role-playing, and puzzle games -- games like Halo and the Final Fantasy series dominate the Western gaming market. However, there is one genre of game that is certainly relatively obscure in the West -- the visual novel.

The visual novel (VN) can be a popular genre of game in Japan, dominating japan gaming market having its a large number of available titles. Since its name implies, the principal focus of a VN is its story. They are usually characterized through its vivid anime-style artwork, juxtaposed with text, static backgrounds, music, sound effects, and voice acting. Gameplay is minimalistic -- a lot of the interaction is achieved through clicking the screen to succeed the storyplot. A VN might have decision points, from which your decisions may affect the upshot of the tale.

The majority of VNs are renai, or having romantic themes, usually inside a school setting. In these VNs, you are taking around the role of the male character with a number of female romantic prospects. The "otome game" reverses this role -- a girl character with more than one hentaispot.net male romantic prospects. However, there are many VNs where romance is not the primary focus; a good example includes the Phoenix Wright series. The VN genre features a various themes, including, but not limited to: mecha, yaoi and yuri (lgbt relationships, respectively), magical girl, and medieval themes.

A lot of VNs contain hentai, or adult scenes. A VN containing them might not be bad; in a romantic-themed story, it might increase the relationship between two characters. However, you can find VNs in which the primary focus depends on the hentai, by having an "excuse plot" to warrant it. Conversely, you will find VNs with no such content. Whether you decide to play a grown-up or all-ages VN, they could have equally great stories.

You can find VNs for both PCs and videogame consoles. If you choose to play a Japanese VN on your personal computer, it's likely you have to change your system's locale to Japanese, or use AppLocale if you are using Windows; otherwise, you will get garbled text. However, you will find translation groups which may have translated numerous Japanese VNs to English.

A sensible way to get a feet wet inside the VN scene is to play some homebrewed ones; there are lots of free English VNs made out of Ren'Py, a totally free VN creation software. Before you go, you can think about several Japanese professional VNs at the Visual Novel Database; demos with the games is available at their respective developer's sites.

Visual novels is a rest from today's action-oriented games. Try one today -- engaging plots, vivid anime-style art, and captivating characters help keep you looking to play more.