iiotenki

The Tony Hawk of Tokimeki Memorial

A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.



iiotenki
@iiotenki

Seeing as I'm in the process of finding an actual, not-Airbnb sort of place to stay in Japan so I can have things like, say, a local bank account and a working cell phone number, I can't say I'm gonna be especially talkative on here for the next couple of weeks, at least compared to my normal activity on Twitter. But, I still wanna post stuff that makes this account different from my other antics elsewhere since I haven't really had a place to post longer form text that isn't my Medium blog, which isn't something I like to use for stuff I write off the cuff. So to break this account in, let's talk about one of the (egg)bugbears that looms over a lot of my coverage: what the hell makes a dating sim a dating sim in my book and what makes them different from those similar-looking adventure and novel games of the visual/sound variety you also find in Japanese games?


First, an extremely brief history lesson. Aside from and in addition to RPGs, lots of Japanese gameplay and storytelling design is derived in some fashion from domestic adventure games. While these days in a Japanese context, the term "adventure" is often synonymous with novel games, what I'm referring to are adventure games in a historical sense that's more familiar to folks outside Japan. I'm talking text parsers, point-and-clicks, and menu-driven affairs. Though most prevalent on Japanese PCs, if you've played stuff like the recent Famicom Detective Club remake, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, or Phoenix Wright, you've played a Japanese adventure game and have a basic idea of the general framework for the genre. As another genre pioneered by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii early in his career, suffice it to say, it's historically been a big deal to many, many narrative-focused developers there, even if the amount of notable new output has slowed down to a trickle from a handful of developers these days.

At any rate, it's best to think of Japanese adventure games as both a distinct genre and also a wider umbrella encompassing other writing-heavy games, as their presentation and overall flow tend to be derived heavily from adventure games. Think of the Japanese adventure game as a circus tent, a circus tent full of other rowdy and sometimes messy narrative games, whether that narrative comes from gameplay or more from prose and structure. It's after the initial genesis and growth of adventure games that folks outside Japan tend to lose the thread about the directions in which they subsequently branched out and how.

In a nutshell, starting in the early to mid-90s, both novel games and dating sims began to arise in parallel. Developers like Chunsoft (as in, the people making little games like Dragon Quest and Shiren the Wanderer) were putting out foundational sound novel titles—we'll get to that distinction later—like Otogirisou and Kamaitachi no Yoru, while a misfit group of developers largely ignored at Konami churned out Tokimeki Memorial, a game released to little expectation and anticipation from both the publisher and players alike. That is, until it become such a vital cornerstone to the establishment and development of Japanese dating sims as a legitimate genre that it remains to this day the best-selling game of its kind across its myriad ports at over a million copies sold, even nearly three decades later. It's actually in these early days before novel games and dating sims start to cross-pollinate with one another that the distinctions between these genres can be seen the clearest. So let's go ahead and take the time to spell out those differences as viewed by Japanese players and critics, which are generally also the definitions I myself abide by when talking about these games online:

  • Adventure games: Relatively analogous to historical western adventure games, whether they're text parsers (basically extinct past the mid-80s), point-and-click (more common, especially Hideo Kojima's games), or menu/command-driven (most common).

  • Dating sims: Games with an overt structure and meta of some sort with a general goal of entering into a relationship with a character. Essentially, a dating sim is a dating sim if there are mechanics of some sort that players have to strategize around in order to achieve their goal, which can often come in the form of stats and calendar/time management, among many other flavors.

  • Novel games: Games that take advantage of the medium to reinvent the prose reading experience using tools and technology made possible only by video games. Sound novels, devised by Chunsoft, were the first major kind, getting their name from the fact that their games were like reading books, but had soundtracks and sound effects to add to the overall ambience in addition to background images displayed behind the main text. As games got more advanced and things like voice acting became more common, the tools that these developers had at their disposal to redefine what it meant to read within a game expanded accordingly.

This is still greatly simplifying the general traits and evolutionary trajectories of each of these genres, but hopefully my brief descriptions are still sufficient enough to demonstrate that, within their native context especially, these are not understood to be synonymous or used interchangeably, as they often mistakenly are in English discussions for reasons best saved for another post. That being said, it's worth emphasizing at this point that while dating sims and novel games emerged around roughly the same period, initially there was little mingling between them and developers/games within those respective genres worked in relative isolation from one another. I say this because while people outside of Japan tend to think of dating sims as having linear narrative progression like novel games (hence the confusion), in the early years, they actually tended to favor mechanics-based storytelling over more prescribed affairs, letting the rhythms and ups-and-downs of a given gameplay run serve as the plot and letting players fill in the blanks themselves by way of suggested and imagined implication. Even as these games eventually began to adopt more set story routes, sometimes to great success as in the case of games like Amagami, that fluidity to take ownership of a given relationship's path, successful or not, always remained in dating sims and is what ultimately sets them apart from novel games in particular.

While novel games also got their start thanks in large part to a major console developer by way of Chunsoft, by and large, the biggest, most important early entries came from the PC scene, where it was embraced as a new storytelling paradigm that was fostered separately from mainstream Japanese games. Whereas the adventure games from which they descended had significantly matured as a genre and had tried and true storytelling techniques depending on the gameplay format and type of story being told, novel games were still being hashed out from scratch throughout the 90s, making them a less reliable source of inspiration for some time for developers working in other genres, including dating sims, which in the case of Tokimeki Memorial and its immediate progeny descended largely from not just adventure games specifically, but also PC-style simulation games (as in, Nobunaga's Ambition-style number-crunching) and RPGs. (Indeed, the sim part of "dating sim" has, historically speaking, been intended to be quite literal, especially in the Japanese terminology, renai simulation, or "romance simulation," which I'd argue is generally a more apt description of what they're usually trying to depict.)

The sales numbers and returns on visual novels were typically magnitudes less than the most successful dating sims and their associated merchandising empires. As a result outside of Chunsoft, few major Japanese publishers or developers ever entered the visual novel business. Indeed, games that are often seen overseas as being visual novels like Phoenix Wright are, in fact, marketed domestically as being adventure games in that traditional sense because to some degree, those differences in market audiences and, arguably, pedigree remain.

Before wrapping up this post, it's also worth quickly breaking down the differences between the two main flavors of Japanese novel games, namely sound and visual novels. In my own observation, these distinctions tend to be even harder for folks outside Japan to readily articulate and pinpoint, likely in large part due to the disjointed localization history for those games and the manner in which they've proliferated overseas. These are differences well worth knowing, though, because they're ultimately two very different kinds of experiences for all of the superficial similarities they share. So here's my take on the basic philosophical and presentational differences between the two:

  • Sound novels: As stated before, these tend to focus on presenting a more traditional prose-reading experience while bringing to bear the additional strengths of telling such stories on game hardware specifically, as exemplified by their preference to present entire paragraphs of text at a time on the screen. The earliest entries of sound novels followed Chunsoft's example of relying on background imagery and ambient audio, either having no on-screen characters or, in the iconic case of Kamaitachi no Yoru, employing silhouettes to encourage players to still use their imagination. Many games do have defined character portraits that are displayed on screen, but the narrative thrust remains the prose itself, perhaps enhanced through some clever programming scripting to enhance immersion (eg: deliberating timing the pace of text displays to emulate a character's thought patterns, etc.).

  • Visual novels: Originally actually synonymous with sound novels and was coined simply to get around Chunsoft's trademark ownership of the term "sound novel" itself. Visual novels come in many flavors, but tend to downplay overt prose in flavor of storytelling progression primarily by way of dialogue and in-character narration. To that effect, text is confined to an isolated text box, rather than occupying the full real estate of the screen in order to, indeed, place a greater spotlight on visual elements such as character sprites and intricately drawn background images, though they can also feature scripting for various purposes, such as to give characters light animation routines. If sound novels are e-books with extra programming and background audio, visual novels are akin a series of storyboards accompanied by a TV or movie script. Though rarely talked about, the argument can be made that they're pretty directly descended from a mostly defunct form of Japanese entertainment known as kamishibai.

All of this is why if you ask me to define what it is I write about, I'll always be particular in saying my interest is in covering traditional dating sims within the sorts of established parameters I've described here. I don't refer to my coverage as being about visual novels because historically, novel games and dating sims have existed in two separate lanes. It's not for a lack of personal interest in or appreciation for novel games; I just think that the philosophy of dating sims to reorient player motivations towards emotional end goals using largely systemic means is a fascinating one that hasn't been explored nearly as thoroughly overseas as they should. To use developer jargon, dating sims by their nature employ different "verbs" from any other genre, ones that are more or less wholly unique to them, and as Tokimeki Memorial itself demonstrated as a dyed-in-the-wool Konami game as I've previously discussed, they can often do so without forsaking their medium. They employ design and narrative tricks you'll find in other genres, just repurposed to other ends and it's both the success and failures of those attempts that continues to capture my attention all these years later.

Anyway, there's my basic breakdown of how to tell these admittedly similar-looking Japanese genres apart. While I've sometimes gotten pushback on Twitter asking why I'm so insistent on being prescriptive and can't simply accept that these genres have become synonymous in western spheres, in my eyes, lumping all of these games together too liberally simply because they have some basic presentational similarities derived from their overarching adventure game roots removes them from conversations and design movements they were intended to participate in at the time of their release. Decisions about genre and the resulting impact on structure and mechanics were made deliberately and I feel it ultimately leads to a more enriching examination of these games when people take the time to appreciate what makes them different from one another within their native terms. Put another way, even though they have indeed cross-polinated in some significant ways, dating sims and visual novels have still remained so distinct from one another in terms of structure, flow, and mechanical emphases that it would be unwise to think that a person deeply into one genre will automatically enjoy the other. I would never recommend Tokimeki Memorial to someone who likes, say, Stein's;Gate just because they both happen to feature text boxes and anime portraits because experientially, the spheres that they otherwise occupy are profoundly apart and offer very different sensations when played.

It's a hill I know I can't count on many people dying on with me in the short-term, which is okay. For all my reservations about categorizing these games as one cohesive thing when they functionally aren't, I understand how it happened and am sympathetic to how, without additional coverage and more games properly localized both historic and recent, it can be tremendously difficult for non-Japanese speakers to tell them apart. Ultimately I feel my role is to advocate for dating sims and what makes them unique as games first and foremost and can just hope that I find the words and methods to draw more attention to these distinctions over time. So if this post helped you make better sense of what I've been going on about for the last five years in particular, I'll consider that a victory in itself. :eggbug:


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in reply to @iiotenki's post:

thanks for such an insightful post tom!! I’ve generally known a lot of the rough distinction & history but since sound novels are way less commonly localized it’s one I’ve always been unsure about. of course now that I know this, I realize that my game ESC is basically a sound novel. so I’m glad I have that distinction now haha

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!!!

I thought I had a good idea, and thanks to your article there I knew I wasn't a million miles off the mark - but that history around the copyrighted term is super interesting! Do you know if there was any other backlash from other development houses over the term, or did they all just pick up visual novel and move on?

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.

To that effect, text is confined to an isolated text box, rather than occupying the full real estate of the screen

I think Leaf struck a distinction whereby visual novel presentation was full screen, while the isolated text box presentation was AVG. Other developers who used "visual novel" in Japanese mostly also followed that for some years. That's broken down by now, but I think that's under the influence of English speakers using visual novel for both.