The Future Looks…Pretty Good, Actually
Where is all this going? Aside from money in someone else’s pocket, at any rate, visual novels have the potential to ride this wave to somewhere pretty great. Looking at the overall trend, the Steins;Gate distribution on PSVita seems to be more of an outlier. The real meat will be with Steam’s continuing Greenlight support and Kickstarter.
Specifically, the rate at which Kickstarter projects are fulfilled will matter. Kickstarter has a tendency to plant ideas in people’s minds, take their money, and then not deliver. It isn’t always because the teams aren’t working (though sometimes they work the wrong way), but localizing a visual novel takes a great deal of time. The more timely this process goes, the more likely that more and more people will buy in.
And if there’s another great gateway into the medium, it’s JRPGs. JRPGs with a high amount of hybrid content like Tears to Tiara 2, which is essentially a tactical RPG with a huge amount of visual novel content. Or Fire Emblem Awakening, which told its story almost exclusively as as a traditional visual novel.
The best part of all this is: it’s all about having fun. Right now the major companies are surging. They’re bringing visual novels, games, and stories that previously would never have been experienced outside of Japan and Japanese-fluent individuals, to the West for a huge portion of the world i.e. anyone who understands English with a baseline PC. And there’s something for everyone: horror fans, romance lovers, and strategy enthusiasts all have a game for them in the visual novel world. It’s a great medium, and if the trend keeps rising fans both old and new alike will rejoice.
