A most of the time Japanese>English game translator and writer and all the time dating sim wonk.
challenging the western press (and nintendo's own english marketing) to once again remember that real, bona fide japanese adventure games do, in fact exist and to not call the famicom detective club games visual novels because of collective amnesia in light of that series getting a brand spanking new installment
good luck!!!
getting people to distinguish detective adventure games from digital novels is a battle that's being lost more every day as adventure games fade from the collective memory and everything with text boxes starts being called a novel
The description on the store page for the Famicom Detective Club remakes isn't helping: https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/famicom-detective-club-the-two-case-collection-switch/
"Search for the truth in two gripping visual novels"
it's been crazy to see this happen. who could have even imagined this would be the outcome. going back in time and telling myself "when you talk about ace attorney in interviews as a frame of reference for people who have never heard of visual novels before, you gotta get WAY more pedantic about it"
Ahaha, I definitely don't blame anybody individually for conflating the two, but yeah, it's been the weirdest development to see because the western press used to have the vocabulary for games like these? If you look at reviews of that original DS release for the first Ace Attorney, you'll see people call them adventure games with basically no additional qualifications, but now I really struggle to see the term get used at all in English. I once tried to amend the Phoenix Wright Wikipedia page to remove the VN labeling and I think specifically left a comment saying, "This isn't how Capcom has ever marketed the series natively" and within like an hour, it'd been reverted. 😵💫
I don't ever truly expect to win this battle, but at the same time, I would feel awful knowing what I do if I didn't die on this hill anyway, ahaha.
