You saw the title, this thread is to discuss various visual novels you’ve played or are playing and recommend some if you wish. VN hybrids are also allowed, like VNs that add various other game genres or otherwise non-VN games that use VN style presentation in story scenes. Also, considering how many genre classics are locked behind JP only releases and fan translations, I ask you not share info where to find illegal fan translations for such games (feel free to mention that such a thing exists of course).
I’ll start us off with a few recommendations.
Winter Wolves
Winter Wolves is a small indie studio that mostly amounts to a single Italian dev named Celso Riva and maybe the odd co-writer (not often) and various composers and artists he commissions, often with long term plans (many of his fantasy games are built on a massive commission dump he did ages ago because he wouldn’t be able to contact the artist in the near future, for example). He also produces a lot of games. Feel free to check his TV Tropes pages and be in awe at just how often he releases games because yeah wow. Does a mix of general games and adult games, and its common for his steam releases to have a free DLC attached to allow the adult content.
It is genuinely impressive how much this dude has done with ren’py over the course of two decades. Alongside traditional VNs and dating sims, he’s also done investigation games, life sims, full blown RPGs, card battle games, and even a stab at making an alchemy shop sim. Most all of his games also have a ton of romantic paths to follow, often with gay and bi options, with very rare exceptions. The writing can be a tad iffy, Riva having English as his second language, but can also punch above its weight in themes or character drama, and balancing the tone well with a lot of good comedy bits.
Loren the Amazon Princess is his most popular game and a personal all-time favorite. It’s a beginner friendly RPG that’s very uneven in the stat balancing, but in a fun way the original Mass Effect was like in that once you see the code, you can break the difficulty on your knee. The actual story is straightforward fantasy stuff, but with some fun characters with solid arcs, a unique hook where you play as a slave acting as the second in command to the actual protagonist, and some well done diluting of the black and white morality in the expansion, plus three great additional party members (especially Chambara).
That game is also the foundation of the shared Aravorn fantasy setting, where many games are set with shared continuity. I’d say the crown jewel of these is Seasons of the Wolf, which is far more difficult and does have one choice I don’t like where the lesbian love interest is locked out of a good ending if you don’t play as the female character and romance her, and it’s a bit bloated with quests…but man, when it hits, it hits. The Bad Blood DLC is genuinely fantastic too, with an amazing ending. Some plot points from that game get followed up in the recent Thieves of Dingirra, which has you also building up a thief guild, and has a great selection of romantic options.
As for more Loren centric games, that’s right now just Cursed Lands and An Elven Marriage (which also revolves around a character first mentioned in Amber’s Magic Shop, which is more difficult for me to recommend for how dull the crafting gets). Both of these are great for different reasons, the former for the whole Mass Effect two style set up of having to form a squad of weirdos to tackle a situation well above their expertise, while the latter is the first part of a direct continuation that returns to the old Loren battle system.
The Planet Stronghold series is very uneven, but only because the first game was basically a one-man show of a project with a very inexperienced dev. It has charm but there’s a lot of genuine issues with the tanky enemies and not thought out skill system. That said, Colonial Defense and Planet Stronghold 2 are genuinely fantastic, the first a prequel and the latter a sequel (obviously) that can be easily picked up without having played the first game. CD is a card battle game with simplified deck building elements that’s actually a lot of fun, but the real star of the show is just the sheer amount of dialog between the crew. They have a fun, familiar energy as a bunch of co-workers working in a terrible situation and making it work, and it’s refreshingly open with how casual everyone is about topics of sex and such. The sequel, on the other hand, builds on a very shaky foundation and really succeeds on making a story about trying to survive a desperate situation with frustrating allies, making every win really feel like a win. Even the battle system is fun as long as you remember to use the crafting system to mod up weapons if you can’t find a good one for a given party member. Also like how it handles returning romances, creating a situation where the relationship gets tested and you have the option to end things and peruse someone new in this game, or try and repair things.
Worth mentioning Volleyball Heaven and Christine’s Care as games directly about being queer in the modern world (as in this is the main theme of each game), The Curse of Mantras for being another card battler with a genuinely bonkers story set in limbo built on dream logic, and Save The World for a really out there idea of what if aliens who didn’t fully understand human morality tried to solve our problems by, indeed, killing the rich, but not understanding the complexities of reforming broken systems or creating new ones. Oh, and shout out to the yuri dating sim At Your Feet, which began with Riva joking on social media about haha foot fetishes are kind of weird what if I made a game about that and then he meme’ed himself into actually doing that and the end result was a surprisingly sincere game about a woman with a foot fetish trying to open up to others but also he commissioned an acoustic guitar backed theme song that plays and loops on the main menu and first few parts of the game and I was laughing so hard at the commitment to the bit.
As a side note, the only time I’ve seen a dev meme themselves into making a genuinely good but also hilarious game is when Dan Marshall made a football game while not knowing anything about football and refusing to learn. The end result is true, unmatched art.
428: Shibuya Scramble
One of the rare games to get perfect scores from Famitsu, and it genuinely deserves it, and is easily playable thanks to an official release on steam with a good translation. The premise if that you jump around the story from the perspective of various characters in Shibuya, which is going to have a terrorist attack go down in it within the next few hours. You have to guide all the characters to avoid bad ends to continue into the next part of the story as well, some bad ends being dramatic, and others very, very funny.
The entire thing is told with photos and short video bits with live actors (including that guy you may remember for nearly being driven insane in a Japanese gameshow where he was trapped in a room for two months or something, no really loom it up) and has some truly fantastic presentation in how it uses text and scene transitions with music and sound cues to create mood. The ending also had me nearly jump out of my seat in joy, a truly fantastic game about people trying to move past their pain and trauma to be their best selves for the sake of others. Also notable to where the character Canaan came from, who got her own OVA.
The Silver Case games
The first series Grasshopper Manufacture ever did, and they really hit it out of the park. The Silver Case, Flower Sun and Rain, and The 25th Ward are all extremely worth your time for different reasons each, but all flow into each other with shared characters and a continuing story that grows more nebulous as reality of the setting gets more surreal.
The Silver Case’s big innovation was using comic style panels and transitions to create a very unique and striking tone. It’s one of the few VNs I actively played at night just to preserve the atmosphere. The actual story is also really interesting and deals with a lot of issues we’re struggling with today, including the impact the internet has on subcultures and media, and how ideas can spread like fire and well out of the realms of actual reality. The remake version they released a few years back is must play stuff, and it’s all made better by Suda having another writer handle the Placebo scenarios via Masahi Ooka. His work in this side story really gives the series a unique heart in the more personal perspective of a reporter starting to lose himself in what he’s uncovered. Also he has a pet turtle and you better not say anything bad about it or he’s leaving!
Flower Sun and Rain breaks the formula by introducing free roaming 3D areas and a focus on puzzle solving, but it still feels very much like it was made by people who mostly knew VNs. The 25th Ward, however, is just straight up insane, a game equal parts hilarious and horrifying on how it puts a magnifying glass on the worst flaws of modern society and how it can turn those in it into monsters. The remake added in some fantastic epilogue and prologue chapters that added a lot to each story as well, the new chapter for Placebo being just straight up beautiful.
Do want to give a content warning with The 25 Ward, though, because of particular scene where a main character Shiroyabu (TW: Sexual Assault) assaults a female assassin. The scene is very uncomfortable, which was clearly the intention, in how it uses pitch black humor to highlight just how low Shiroyabu has gone (the entire chapter basically being a descent into madness), but it comes so far out of nowhere with the purposeful tone shifts that it ends up being too much for people If you play on playing the game, just be aware if that’s an issue for you.
Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate+
Christine Love’s first successful commercial projects. If you never played them, I’d give them a strong recommendation. The idea is you are exploring an old ship and trying to access files on it to figure out what happened to it, but the controls are busted and you have to read through what you can and give binary answers to the AIs on the system (who are of course cute anime girls) to find a way to the info, complicated by having no way to interact with the AI girls without them asking a question first. The sequel moves to your ship and you repeat a similar process reading through old files you downloaded.
The games hit differently nowadays as we can see a similar social regression happening just outside our window. The entire hook is life aboard the ship somehow regressed to pre-feminist ancient Korea, based on actual historical reading Love did on pre-industrial time periods. It gets pretty emotionally rough at points, but it’s very engaging. Just be warn a lot of the drama focuses on rampant misogyny and the evils that come with that. so be aware coming into it.
Scar of the Doll
Wanted to give this smaller, much rougher game a shout out because it was made by the future scenario writer of Folklore, that really weird fairy tale inspired JRPG on the PS3. There’s a lot of obvious issues, but I found myself surprised by how well paced the story was and the directions it ended up going. Recommend going into this one blind.
I have a lot more I want to mention but I’ll stop here for now.
