You might enjoy the Visual Novel Database (VNDB).
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Hmmm, 30000 novels…it would be hard to read them all, but I’m surprised it’s not more!
The two I got wrapped up in are Doki Doki Literature Club (which is meta-horror and possibly not a good starting place though it was just remastered with new content) and Danganronpa which is like a murder mystery reality show courtroom drama satire on anime steroids. It’s one of those “it gets really good in the second game if you can hang in for the first 50 or so hours!” The frustration of the first one is more than justified by what happens in the second Goodbye Despair and the swervy rollercoaster of V3: Killing Harmony
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I’m sure you’ve seen me mention it before, but my two favorite VNs are Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni (aka Higurashi: When They Cry) and Muv-Luv. It’s honestly hard to describe either of them without spoilers.
Higurashi is about a bunch of school kids trying to live life in a backwater town but horrific events keep happening, and the series is about solving that mystery. It’s eight chapters (about 10 - 15 hours long each) with the first 4 being question arcs and the last 4 being answer arcs. In other words, you’re supposed to be really confused for the first four chapters but it’ll all be explained. The series is horror but it isn’t actually gory at all.
Muv-Luv is a lot more difficult to explain without spoiling. The hook that would draw people in is the big plot twist, so it’s worth spoiling just to see if you like it. So basically the game is “Muv-Luv Extra” and it’s pretty much a parody of your typical slice of life harem VN taking place in high school as always. It’s humorous and enjoyable, but I wouldn’t recommend it based on that. The plot twist is that once you complete the game it unlocks a new option on the start screen called “Muv-Luv Unlimited”. In this story, your character wakes up in an alternate reality where 90% of the world’s population has been killed off by unkillable swarms of monsters and where your school once stood is now a military base and all of your classmates are mech pilots that fight the monsters. Only your character is able to remember the normal world where you were just classmates and the monsters didn’t exist. Muv-Luv Alternative and the sequels are based on this world. Muv-Luv can be pretty gory if you have the 18+ version. It also has sex scenes in that version, but you miss out on some big “Oh snap!” moments if you get the all ages version because it also removes gore, so it’s a difficult choice between the two.
Muv-Luv Extra (including Unlimited) and Muv-Luv Alternative are both at least 50 hours each.
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“All visual novels are quite useless.” - Oscar Wilde
I have never been able to focus much on “pure” visual novels, but there are VNs I like that mix in more adventure gameplay elements. Some titles I’m very fond of include AI: The Somnium Files (and 999 by the same author), the Ace Attorney series, and We Know The Devil. I’ve also had Umineko: When They Cry recommended to me numerous times.
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What would Oscar Wilde even consider a visual novel?
… Sounds very interesting!! I’m sold. I can Google it obviously but for the sake of conversation (
) where can the game be played?
Thanks!
Adam 
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Blake’s illuminated manuscripts?
The Great Red Dragon and the Waifu Clothed in the Sun, perhaps.
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You’re in luck. It’s 40% off right now too.
The screenshots don’t even attempt to hide the twist I was talking about. Haha.
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well, on this debate… I consider Ren’Py an half-sister of IF, because, well, many years ago, I explained, in an exchange of E-mails with PyTom, the recipe of building a solid niche sector, that is, our solid foundations, a centralised agorà and archive, back then the agorà was raif/rgif, and the IF archive. PyTom heeds my suggestion, and the result is what we see.
On Kinetic vs. Visual, I must point that in Japanese language movie is “Kinema”, as in many EU languages, so kinetic is in the sense given by Lumierè back in 1890s.
But I prefer to compare VNs and KNs to stage/puppet plays, because the visual layout embodies the very core of a stage play is visual layout: a static background (stage flat) and a foreground where the NPCs/PCs talks (actors/puppets)
Lastly, I think (but never experimented beyond simple proof-of-concept) that indeed Ren’Py can be used for developing a text-only choice-based IF.
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Kinetic novels are visual novels. They’re a subgenre. They’re just the name used to easily refer to VNs that don’t have choices. Much like how you have platformer games as the general genre, and then you have metroidvanias as a subgenre.
I don’t think the term kinetic has anything to do with kinema. I don’t believe “kinema” is used much anyway because I didn’t even realize it existed until I looked it up just now. I’ve always seen movie written as 映画 (eiga) both in study text and in the wild. I think kinetic is based off its english definition, as in kinetic energy.
Although I have a slight correction to my earlier info. I was brainfarting and forgot that kinetic wasn’t a company, it was a brand of game that VisualArts released. They coined the term to tag which of their games were without choices, and players just started applying it to non-VisualArts games that met the same criteria.
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Just want to say a general thanks to this thread for educating me about VN; I had not realised it was a genre in this sense, though I have played Doki Doki a bit. I am hoping I have persuaded my daughter to try her hand at writing a VN, using Ren’Py. She likes drawing on her tablet, and learnt Python at school, and is starting A levels in graphic design and computing in September. Sounds ideal if she can just apply herself…
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The “kinetic” in that context is, I believe, a reference to the fact that unlike a paper novel, the images in a kinetic novel move.
@ramstrong , the company trademarking the term definitely preceded anyone else using it that way. Before, visual novels tended to be called visual novels, unless someone wished to call them by the Japanese term for the genre a particular novel happened to occupy (in the same sense that someone might talk about a sci-fi adventure instead of “text adventure” or “interactive fiction”).
@mathbrush , I like Long Live The Queen (which VNDB insists doesn’t count as a visual novel - it’s not just IF that has category boundary discussions!), Cinders, Her Tears Were My Light and B.A.T. However, they are four very different kinds of visual novel. (Long Live The Queen is about navigating a treacharous political situation, Cinders is a fractured fairy tale, Her Tears Were My Light is a very sweet and chaste romance and B.A.T is about looking after a number of bats).
Not all visual novels come to VNDB’s attention (though all the major ones and a large number of minor ones do). Also, VNDB has a fairly specific definition of “visual novel” that means that some games that others might define as visual novel are deemed to be something else (in which case, their entry is excised).
@Piergiorgio_d_errico Technically, it’s even possible to do pure text parser IF (with no choices at all) in Ren’Py, though I don’t know how well the available parser plug-ins work. At that, I think they only provide input and output; the processing would still need to be done by hand-coding, without the structural affordances granted by the likes of Inform or Adventuron. That, and the huge file sizes would probably lead to anyone used to more typical text adventure formats pointing and laughing. These are the most likely reasons I can think of why I’ve never seen an actual parser-based IF based on Ren’Py. Simply because one can do something does not necessarily mean one should…
@The_Pixie I hope your daughter enjoys the process of making a game in Ren’Py! Please let me know if you need any help - I have made a VN demo in Ren’Py, and at the very least she’s likely to do better art for her VN than I have thus far for mine 
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