Japan calls them a variety of different things. Sometimes they're called "adventure games", like Monkey Island or Phoenix Wright, or "kinetic novel" or "sound novel". They don't actually use the term "visual novel" though. (complicating this a bit, it's common in Japanese game marketing to make up a new genre for every game series instead of just saying it's "an FPS" or whatever.)

> [...] it causes people to say things like "they're not a fan of the genre", which is a weird thing to say about the concept of books.

I'm not a fan of the genre because it tends to be terrible. Way more uncomfortable than reading a book (staring at a computer screen), the requirement to press "next" or choose between trivial dialogue choices is tiring, and the writing is uniformly terrible.

So in principle I wouldn't have anything against the genre, except in practice it's terrible.

There is a genre of videogames that is way better than visual novels and requires lots of reading, but also has real and often innovative gameplay: interactive fiction (the evolution of text adventures of old, Infocom et al).

Some of them like When they Cry or Planetarian have full-screen text - those are the ones Japan actually calls "novel games". Those are usually more worth reading.

Whoa, that's harsh. I suspect that has to do more with translation quality than the writing quality. Getting translation right is difficult, if not impossible. But people tend to underestimate that. Additionally, dialogue choices in visual novels are far from trivial. They often represent major turning points in the story.

Though visual novels aren't quite mainstream even in Japan, they were quite popular. If the writing was uniformly terrible, it wouldn't have sold as much.

It's ok that other people like them though, I'm not the Good Taste Police.

> Though visual novels aren't quite mainstream even in Japan, they were quite popular. If the writing was uniformly terrible, it wouldn't have sold as much.

I'm sure you can find the flaw in "lots of people like this therefore it cannot be uniformly terrible". There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon.

In Spanish we have a saying: "eat poop, millions of flies cannot be wrong!".

> I'm not a fan of the genre, but that's neither here nor there

...and some are highly branchy, the Western equivalent being CYOA.

Kagetsu Tohya: http://www.nowere.net/a/src/1347481654955.jpg

Clannad: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Morlok8k/Clannad_VN_Flowch...

Those are all DAGs, but I suspect there are some with actual loops too.

Well, the problem in this case is that the answer isn't "lots of them" but "very few of them". And those that have options, based on reviews I've seen, are mostly cosmetic, the story is "on rails".

Being "on rails" defines the genre, I'd say. That, and terrible writing.

I think perhaps you shouldn't speak with such authority on the medium. Many have terrible writing, many have excellent writing. It depends on the author(s) and also to an extent on the localization team if it's being read in English or another language.

What "authority"? I'm giving my opinion; this started with the comment "I'm not a fan of the genre". I don't claim to be an authority.

All of the visual novels I've played were terrible and their plots would have been rightfully mocked had they been books. They also had little to no branching and lacked any meaningful decisions. Note I played many that were highly regarded in websites such as Home of the Underdogs, whose owner was a fan of the genre.

That's just my experience (based on playing games since the Commodore 64). I base my opinions on my experience. I don't push them on you. It entitles me to say I'm no fan of the genre -- no more, no less.

Sorry if this upsets you.

I wonder why a struck such a nerve for multiple users here on HN just because I said I wasn't a fan of a genre. I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition!