Reading: The Video Game

Everyone's heard the complaint at least once in their time as a gamer. Most of us have undoubtedly said it at one point while playing an RPG, and if you've ever played Metal Gear Solid these words are practically a mantra.

"How long am I going to have to sit and read/listen to this? Let me get back to the game, already! I want to save the princess/disarm the nuke/make a sandwich!"

The majority of gamers don't play games to read; they play to act out an adventure in a fantasy land or a warzone or the sports field. Reading is for school - it isn't fun, and time they spend talking about how terrible wars are is time they could be spending shooting a man in the face.

Not so much the case in Japan. Unlike us, the Japanese appreciate story in their games. A lot. In fact, there is an entire genre which consists of nothing but one, neverending cutscene.

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the world of Visual Novels.

Ah, Wikipedia. Is there anything you can't give me a sample image for?

Visual Novels can cover a wide variety of genres, from high-fantasy to steampunk to sci-fi to gothic horror. They can take ten minutes to play through, or several hours to see absolutely everything. They can tell stories of epic warfare, heartbreaking romance or mind-twisting mystery.

Separating them from plain books is a variety of added functionality - books, for example, don't usually have pictures that change along with the plot. They definitely don't have soundtracks to go with them, producing a variety of excellent songs as a result. There's also the added ability in certain VNs to make choices that will alter the plot entirely, effectively meaning you can play one of three or four different stories (or 'routes', as they're typically known). Imagine it as one of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books from an era bygone, except on a dozen different illegal drugs.

But there's one thing that all VNs have in common. You will have to read. Lots and lots of text. There will be no chance to use your itchy trigger finger, and you can't rack up a high score.

Unsurprisingly, Western audiences generally haven't been very receptive to the concept of games that don't involve instant action and gratuitous violence. They don't care about taking time for characterisation, they want to go out there and hurt things or score more points than the other guy. It's for this reason that several people don't even quantify VNs as games, because games require interaction beyond pressing a button to continue onto the next block of text.

And in my opinion, that's a real shame.

Recent Western RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age have shown that it's possible to get a player interested in the game's own little universe. The amount of potential background reading the game gives you is astonishing, and that's before covering the novelisations that have been released for both of these games. Even the Halo games have a series of books looking into the history of the game.

So why, then, do games that thrive off this same level of atmosphere lurk in obscurity?

Most of the problem probably revolves around the typical language barrier issues. If there's a lot of text there's obviously a lot of translation work to do, so unless a company expected to make a huge profit by selling it to the West (which, quite frankly, they don't) they won't bother giving us an English version. Fortunately, there are a variety of fan translations for popular VNs available for free download, so anyone interested enough can buy the original and enjoy it in their native language.

This is also a good explanation as to why there are almost no Visual Novels released originally in English - there just isn't a market for them any more. The days of living out a story without absolute real-time interaction and blistering thrill being played out in front of you are in their twilight. The genre originally began in the West, with the first text adventures on archaic old computers, but only Japan has held to it with such strength.

However, in response, the genre has evolved, and what we're receiving instead is a newer genre of interactive fiction that goes a step further in allowing the player to believe they're literally living out the story. Without a doubt, the best example of this genre is the PS3 game Heavy Rain, a game that has received all sorts of critical praise for revolutionising the concept of games as an experience rather than just a hobby. There's a feeling of genuine connection with your player characters in Heavy Rain compared to other games of the era - a feeling of being part of the game's universe, rather than simply playing a game in your living room.

That's the feeling that VNs have been working towards for decades. Heavy Rain may just be a sign that developers have finally cracked how to take an old system and turn it into something new and refreshing - something that won't make you irritated by watching two characters talk to each other for five minutes in the middle of the next action sequence. I, for one, am eager to see where the genre can go after this, because things will only get even better from here.

Quite an advance from walls of text, huh?