Ferns

Sure! Thank you for reading and I'm glad you got some use out of it! Sound novels are definitely the thorniest for folks to pick out and it wasn't until I really sat down and while I definitely always had a "I know one when I see one" sort of sense about it, it wasn't until I saw down a few months ago and real thought about it that I found a way to quantify those difference and it's nice to hear they make sense to someone who isn't necessarily as knee-deep in all this as me, ahaha. But certainly given your influences when it comes to stuff like Radical Dreamers in particular, ESC always personally struck me as being at least sound novel adjacent and it's cool to hear you feel the same. After playing a chunk of the Tsukihime remake recently and really enjoying what it does with that format, it really makes me thirst for more proper sound novels like it, they do cool stuff worth studying!!!

First off off, thanks for reading! Gratifying to hear folks have found it useful! 😌But to answer your question, somewhat the latter, yeah. Visual novel is itself a trademarked term by the development team who came up with as a workaround to Chunsoft's ownership, so historically, a lot of games have still been marketed as "adventure" in that very broad sense as sort of a safe, generic alternative, even if they have none of the mechanics and interaction of those historical games. But, the owner of the visual novel trademark has never been particularly litigious about it as far as I know, so there is increasingly an uptick in games being openly marketed in Japan as visual novels, perhaps because they think the term has effectively been genericized and ownership can't be enforced. The term still largely gets used with foreign developed games specifically, but I am definitely seeing more and more Japanese games self-identify as visual novels, too, especially in the last two or three years.