/lit/ - Literature

A perennial favorite of /lit/ would be graphic novel discussions.

I believe the consensus for graphic novels is that some of the top tier works qualify as being worthy of inclusion, and discussion. When they fall into the stereotyped cliches of the medium, your basic capeshit/manga/daily cartoon/bog standard anime/etc., they are better left for /a/ and /co/ and the like.

Watchmen is probably the gold standard for comparison. There are many others strongly recommended, even when they are nowhere near as wordy as Watchmen.

At this late date I'm sure most people have at least heard of text based games; the old Infocom days.

For computer games, for my own self, the standard yardstick for comparison would be a little known title: Starflight. Within the technological limitations of the time this game was able to present a compelling story, humor, strong characterizations via limited dialog, and a wealth of allusions to the source material of 1970s and early 80s popular science fiction. This game even did justice to the common tropes of the time with occasional backhanded twisting. It predates Ian M. Banks own troupe slanting stories with a setup to a conclusion that is deliciously brutal.

A fusion of technologies and media is what the future is made of. To the extent that visual novels embrace literary and writing techniques will be the measure of their acceptance as literature.

Now that I've said all that, some recommendations are in order. But for this I must sit back and observe.

What are the best of VNs?

Vidya has some weird way of choosing where things can go differently. An example is in Blade Runner. You may show loyalty to the andies and can kill Sergeant Guzza when they're about to do it anyway. You can't retire a rep immediately after you figured out he is one in this particular game because he's on stage.

If you meant to talk about something more static like in the picture, then I don't see why it isn't a comic.

>>9213

do rpg videogames count?

i'm far from an avid player but i, and apparently many other, had their basic english very much improved by playing final fantasy 7.

but to answer you question is that beside having a story to tell, there is not many similarities,if we are talking about videogames.

especially because i guess the main focus is not the story but the gaming aspect.

sort of like this movie's main goal was to cram as many beatles songs as they could rather than to tell a story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_Universe_(film)

>>9214

Not sure. I haven't read many myself, but I used Fate/stay night in the OP because it was amazing. Instead of just making use of the different in-route choices and the routes themselves to just give different variations of the same story, it uses the same characters and setting to deliver three separate stories all expressing different variants of the same theme: conquering oneself.

The first story is essentially a slightly smuttier version of young adult fiction: you have the hero, the love interest, the mentor figure, and pretty much nobody dies except for the people who deserved it. The theme is oneself as an ideal.

The second story gets a bit darker, and has a lot more action scenes, and a much more confident protagonist. It has a bit more philosophy to it, and it brings to question the protagonists initial motivations and motivations throughout the first story, but it's still fairly light, and ends on an upbeat note. The theme there is struggling with oneself as an ideal.

The third story is the friction with real and ideal. It's got the most boring filler scenes, unfortunately, but for the most part is very well written, and the ending is absolutely amazing - either normal ending or true ending. Hell, two of the possible bad ends at different points are both amazing. It also gives you a chance to interact with one of the villains from the prior two stories in a non-combat sense, turning an antagonist who would otherwise simply be "above average" into "one of the best of all time". The same goes for the protagonist, though to a lesser extent.

>>9218

The picture is of a visual novel. They are not strictly video games, but they are certainly not comics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel

>>9220

Game-play is a secondary aspect to visual novels. The main purpose is to tel the story, and generally with some pretty exceptional word counts.

YA fiction for 20 somethings weened on anime/manga/videogames, nothing more.

>>9221

>In Fate/stay night, for example, the way the player character behaved towards non-player characters during the course of the game affects the way they react to the player character in later scenes, such as whether or not they choose to help in life-or-death situations.

A comic based on this would show the bad decision, the ending it causes, then turn back and show only what a different decision changes. Like Groundhog Day, it doesn't have to explain anything.

>that Wikipe-tan

Oh wait, it gets better.

>It is not uncommon for visual novels to have morality systems. A well-known example is the 2005 title School Days, an animated visual novel that Kotaku describes as going well beyond the usual "black and white choice systems" (referring to video games such as Mass Effect, Fallout 3, BioShock and Civilization V with the Brave New World expansion pack) where you "pick a side and stick with it" while leaving "the expansive middle area between unexplored." School Days instead encourages players to explore the grey, neutral middle-ground in order to view the more interesting, "bad" endings

>Other notable examples of non-linear storytelling include ELF's most famous visual novel, YU-NO: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world (1996), which featured a science fiction plot revolving around time travel and parallel universes. The player travels between parallel worlds using a Reflector device, which employs a limited number of stones to mark a certain position as a returning location, so that if the player decides to retrace steps, they can go to an alternate universe to the time they've used a Reflector stone.

>A popular subgenre of visual novels is the nakige (泣きゲー "crying game"?), also known as utsuge (鬱ゲー "depressing game"?). The main purpose of such a game is to make the player feel for the characters and make them cry due to emotional scenarios which serves to leave a bigger impact on the player after the game is over. These games often follow a similar formula: a comedic first half with a heart-warming romantic middle followed by a tragic separation and finally (though not always) an emotional reunion.

>Ryukishi07 of 07th Expansion mentioned in 2004 how he was influenced by Key's works during the planning of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. He played their games, among other visual novels, as a reference and analyzed them to figure out the reason why they were found to be so popular. He figured that the secret was due to how the stories would start with ordinary, enjoyable days, but then a sudden occurrence would happen leading the player to cry due to the shock value. He used a similar model for the basis of Higurashi but instead of leading the player to cry, Ryukishi07 wanted to scare the player with the addition of horror elements.

I've played one of the routes in yume miru kusuri and my god was it boring.

>>9229

>Yume miru kusuri

There's your problem, thats a shit VN

>>9227

But it wouldn't include the audio.