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?
Saw that Steam is having some sort of visual novel bonanza and that the old Walking Dead games, of all things, are topping those particular charts, apparently, so here's a reminder that term once meant something specific in Japanese games, once upon a time.
(And still mostly does, but I get the impression younger writers working in the media here tend to be less literate in that history and have been increasingly inclined to adopt the same sort of wishy-washiness seen in western discussions and that just hurts me, man.)
