Tom

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.

Sure! Thank YOU for reading! I always worry that I come across as preachy and a know-it-all, so it's always genuinely nice to hear when people get something out of what I write.

Thanks! And yeah, I think it's largely a consequence of two things: 1. we lost the thread in terms of localization after a handful of notable adventure games without keeping current with things that came out after the early 90s and then once VNs did start getting officially translated with some regularity towards the end of the 2000s, it was often out of order, completely muddying the evolutionary trajectory, and 2. western media in the interim generally not being as diligent in their coverage as they should've been, despite many outlets often having dedicate Japanese and/or "bilingual" staff (to dubiously varying degrees).

There's definitely been a lot of revisionism at play, especially the last 15 years, which is frustrating, because people actually used to have more accurate vocabulary to describe stuff like Ace Attorney. If you look up old reviews of that original DS release for 1, you'll absolutely see reviewers properly refer to it as an adventure game. But now? I think you'd struggle to ever see those words used even though the mechanics, structure, and presentation of the series haven't changed that much. You could argue that the Carmen Sandiego games share a lot in common with Ace Attorney and you don't see anyone calling those visual novels. I actually once tried to amend the Ace Attorney Wikipedia entry to change the genre to adventure game and left proper notes explaining why and my edit was nuked in like an hour, amazingly. 😩

It also doesn't help that younger Japanese journalists have also just started to uncritically incorporate the western definitions into their own writing, so you can't even count on native coverage for these games always using the legacy native definitions. It's not like I lose sleep over this at night, I know this is a hill that only so many other people are gonna die on with me, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't frustrating since I feel like making these distinctions just makes it easier to quickly tell these games apart for people who might be understandably less deeply versed in this stuff. 😵‍💫