If you are already familiar with visual novels, you may gloss over this section.Ī visual novel is a type of video game. I will start with the basics for those of you who may not be familiar with visual novels. A few are outstanding stories in their own right. All of the visual novels that I have looked at thus far are well-translated. With the exception of Narcissu, most of the visual novels are mostly forgotten here in the United States. Here at The New Leaf Journal, I plan to review most of the visual novels that were translated for the three al|together festivals. The festival was such a success that it was also held in 20, with many more visual novels that would have otherwise been little-read outside of Japan becoming available to English-speaking readers. At al|together, the team at Insani along with other talented translators translated many interesting doujin visual novels from Japanese to English with the consent and approval of the original creators. Now, some people would still argue that VNs cannot be interactive fiction because they have too strong a visual element, and some people come up with new, even bigger umbrella terms in order to talk about games where narrative choice and control is the major gameplay element.īut it's hard to have a discussion on "are VNs interactive fiction?" if we don't know what we're talking about when we say "interactive fiction" to begin with.In 2005, a group called Insani, which translated both commercial and doujin (think indie) visual novel video games from Japanese to English, founded and coordinated the first al|together translation festival. Eventually "text adventure" was no longer appropriate. not in ascii, in "you see four blocks here" text.), and games that didn't have puzzles at all. This community began to experiment further and branched out into games where the plots could be altered, games that were "abuses of the medium" (like implementing tetris in text. Everyone got the same ending, although some would have found slightly different flavor text along the way based on how many interesting verbs and objects they experimented with. Plot-altering decisions were almost nonexistent. Maybe there would be bad ends where you died, but often, as in many older adventure games, you either won or you got stuck. Oldschool text adventures usually had no interactivity in the fiction aspect at all. "Interactive Fiction" is a term that developed from the old "text adventure" fandom (which I used to be involved with circa 2000) as an umbrella term entirely in order to be able to take in more kinds of games. Nor does that have much to do with the definition of interactive fiction.
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