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!!!
Okay, so like, here's the thing that gets in my craw when games like this erroneously get labeled as VNs in English marketing by their publishers—and to NOA's credit so far, they seem to be compromising with "interactive drama" as their genre label this time around, which okay, I guess I'll take it—they're not only misrepresenting the fundamental identity and creative context in which these games exist natively, but perhaps more critically, it's needlessly filtering out chunks of potential players who will assume those games are not for them because of what's obviously associated with that label. I've already seen people in comments sections for this new FDC game go, "Oh, it's a VN? Meh, pass." And, I'm not under any delusions, calling this thing an adventure game isn't going to sell it to THAT many more people overseas. But I think it'll certainly attract more attention at least among certain sectors who, perhaps, mostly only know Lucasarts and Sierra stuff and are interested about how Japanese developers operate within similar spaces.
All my love to my actual VN-making friends out there, of course, but in this sort of landscape where the semantics have been botched so horribly, I do think carefully labeling these games in English is crucial. I've said it before, but if any foreign publisher gets it in their head to localize any of these legacy dating sims that are obviously my beat, you bet your ass that even if it's not technically my place to do so as a localizer that I will be beating the "please call Tokimemo/Amagami/whatever else anything but a VN because they're not if you want maximum sales" drum until I blow their ears out and mine. Strong translation or not, if those games are ever to take off abroad, it is my sincere belief that it's going to take accurate labeling to ensure that they find as broad and accepting of an audience as possible. It's a difficult tide to turn around across the entire discourse at this point, but I think meaningful work can be done at least in individual spaces when presenting these games to ensure that they put their best, truest foot forward.
