Not All Japanese Adventure Games are Visual Novels (Nor are All Dating Sims)

Let's talk about Adventure games. I love a good slow paced adventure when I'm in the right mood. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (buy it buy it buy it) was so good it got me to actually write again. The plot structure can have more build up, more set up, more dramatic rise and fall. The slower nature allows for the focusing in on more detailed areas with detailed art but plenty of time to drink them in. I have adored many structures and sub-genres that fit in the grand scheme of the very broad term "adventure". I have only one issue, one request. Please be aware that not all Japanese adventure games are visual novels.

To explain. A visual novel is a game with a plot you click through, it may have choices, but choices are the only thing you're doing other than reading. It's a good structure for games that are more about experiencing a story. You get a visual component that's rarer in novels and a sound component that's basically unheard of. Animation, splash pages, these techniques can be pulled in from more directly visual mediums like... animation or comic books, but the text density of a novel can be maintained. These are definitely an offshoot of the Japanese adventure game but they very much are not the whole of that genre even before we get into even less recognized forms of the medium such as sound novels. Visual novels, like most genre offshoots, took something the adventure game was good at, subtracted things that were less suited to the games being made, then dialed up on what they needed. The slow pace and text dense nature, the economical use of art that nevertheless sets the scene, the reasonable capacity to incorporate a great deal of text, and the player choice. All of these were kept or emphasized, but to define what was deemphasized I'll need to go into what a Japanese adventure game is.

Probably the single most influential Japanese adventure game is a game that has sadly never been officially translated. Created by Yuji Horii (who also created the Dragon Quest series) its title is typically translated as "The Portopia Serial Murder Case" (Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken). The Japanese adventure game style is typically quite procedural, not in the video game sense of procedural generation, nor the genre sense of the police procedural. Procedural in the sense that you aren't so much solving puzzles in the way the western graphic adventure game has you doing so much as going down lists to make sure you've resolved the right flags. This does have the advantage of being slighly less prone to progress halting moon logic that Sierra and LucasArts games became known for but it can be dissatisfying if the writing doesn't bridge the gaps enough. That said Portopia is both a perfect summation of why they are structured this way and not exactly structured this way. Portopia, particularly the Famicom version (originally the game was produced for Japanese PC formats I have zero experience with) has absolutely no save feature whatsoever, but is actually kind of long. This means that the game is structured to allow the player to quickly recover progress by knowing which flags to trip and intuiting what actions are important. This does contribute to a genre wide divide of "the difference between what the player knows/intuits vs what the game's event flags say the character knows" but that's more a problem of any sort of story based game.

Portopia kickstarted the popularity of the Japanese style adventure game in a way that's hard to overstate, if you've ever played one from the 80s and wondered what on earth a first person maze was doing in there, blame Portopia, it's almost assuredly what was being "homaged". Access to save features would end up moving the genre's direction, if you play something like Jake Hunter (a relatively recent localization of the long-running "Tantei Jinguuji Saburo" series) you'll find many of the same elements at play but streamlined. Go around, talk to people, light environmental inspection. When you've examined everything you needed to and talked to everyone you had to the story will naturally advance. Perhaps the most famous, among nerds, modern example of this style is the not so hidden inspiration for this post, Ace Attorney. Ace Attorney follows this formula to a T and mostly is structured to hide the seams of this concept. In an Ace Attorney case you have trials which typically advance the plot and investigations which hint at where it's going and set up the evidence necessary to solve the puzzles in the trials. Breaks are made from this structure but this is the style being deviated from.

Visual novels, as mentioned, kinda ditched the puzzle solving and procedural element, in part to allow greater story divergence. If you remove those elements you can tell stories that can branch without it completely blowing up the game's structure. It's easy to tell what a player knows, the actual structure of a Japanese adventure game largely precludes this kind of branching because of the more complex flagging. Simplifying the flagging leaves in doubt what the player can be expected to know at all if the structure is retained. Visual novels also can be made with a lower budget for the game's underlying structure allowing more money to be spent elsewhere, or for the whole product to be made cheaper.

So the core point is made that Japanese adventure games and Visual Novels aren't really the same thing, that it's a not terribly confusing distinction even though they are both clearly descended from a similar basis. That said there's a last bit of conflation that feels worth addressing, the dating sim. Dating sims are really more a concept than a genre and they also connect to life sims, elements of which have tentacled into games from Story of Seasons to Persona, but they often get spoken of as interchangeable with VNs so I wanna do a quick genre trace on them. The dating sim's most famous origin point would likely be Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School, a Square and Nintendo co-production that is definitely a themed Japanese adventure game, go through list of things to do, occasionally have to give an emotion and a response. The gimmick of course being that you can "date" a then popular Idol, Nakayama Miho. The origin point here is thus settled in the form of the Japanese adventure game.

I may do some digging into a more in-depth timeline here, but there's very little English information about the late 80s and early 90s dating sim, the next one to be "big" enough to have any sort of English presence is Konami's Tokimeki Memorial, a game that either benefited from a long line of evolution, was extremely innovative, or both. TokiMemo is where the dating sim as schedule management game has definitely entered the vocabulary, whether it introduced it or otherwise. Dating a girl in this game has many elements of essentially a hybrid RPG and spreadsheet, schedules must be managed to allow you to spend time with your chosen girl and to improve your stats and generally keep all your numbers in line. Keeping track of everyone and spending time with every potentially dateable girl so as to avoid them spreading rumors about the player (not touching that subtext). This is the archetypal "dating sim" rather than a romance themed visual novel or adventure game. Elements of this would directly influence many other games in the RPG genre especially, with notable examples including the aforesaid games as well as Sega's Sakura Taisen series. That said elements of this kind of game tend to crop up whenever there's a dating mechanic in a Japanese game and you can see traces of it in even the modern Yakuza games.

So yeah, some rambling semi-related thoughts about Japanese adventure games and what they are most often conflated with. This is a raw pet peeve for me with no real harm done by it for the most part, I just felt strongly about it and wanted to write a quick primer.