The Addicting and Fast-Growing Visual Novel Bandwagon Is Here

The winds of change are blowing. A new bandwagon is getting loaded, and now is the time to jump on.

This refers, of course, to the rising movement that is the Western visual Novel market. Thanks to the wild successes of 2014, 2015 is already shaping to be an incredible year. Where it goes from here is anyones guess, but the facts are clear: money is flowing, and the smart will pay attention.

Visual Novels and the AAA Game

Or rather, what exists of it. The market isn’t exactly bursting at the seams with Western visual novels. Apart from the very select few smash hits, visual novels don’t garner a lot of attention.

But then again, maybe they do. After all, Steins;Gate shares the Metacritic rating of 87, the 7th highest among PC games in 2014. Dangangonpa 2: Goodbye Despair sold tens of thousands of copies in North America alone. JASTUSA, Mangagamer, Sekai Project, and other distributors continue to localize their niche’s products for the West.

Steins;Gate did so well, in fact, that publisher PQube decided it was worth localizing the PSVita version as a separate product. Even the Steam community continues to Greenlight visual novel after visual novel. And if the online distributor’s latest “anime sale” isn’t an indicator of their rising popularity, nothing is.

Will they ever be regarded as AAA titles, however? The easy answer is no. Despite the rise in popularity, the sales differences and potential profits of a game like Danganronpa or Virtue’s Last Reward is still several orders of magnitude below games like Destiny and Call of Duty.

But if you follow the money, there might be a different story.

Kickstarter Was Key

It goes without saying that Kickstarter was key for visual novels in 2014 and now. The World End Economica series. WAS – The Hourglass of Lepidoptera. Sekai Project is the publisher making the most use out of the platform, and it’s paying off – literally. Over half a million dollars up front to bring Clannad, already adapted into a hit anime series, sounds like a pretty good deal for them. And in a “niche” market, at that.

Steam is starting to garner more attention for its cache of visual novel titles. The anime sale proved that. But Kickstarter remains a solid way to ensure that there’s a viable market for the localization of such titles. Whatever limbo the final game in the Zero Escape trilogy is stuck in, it might be crowdfunded platforms like Kickstarter that get it out.

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.