Current Events > What's with the rise of interactive novels in gaming?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think the Ace Attorney series really popularized it, and that's a decent series. A visual novel is a very smart decision for a game in which you play as a detective/attorney. It's a different take on a puzzle game where you look for the pieces and put them together to make your case. You have some campy characters and some comedic dialogue added in to make things enjoyable even in boring parts.

But the craze seems to have spread, and with it comes a lot of mediocrity. Telltale Games is a big perpetrator of this with a vastly emphasized story and vastly de-emphasized gameplay.

The most disappointing game I've seen in this trope is Detroit: Become Human. They've sacrificed all aspects of what you would call a game to make a thoughtless interactive (and I use that term very loosely here) movie. They poured all of their resources into making the game look good and they forgot to include an actual game.

There are points where a character perceives a set of actions to get from point A to B, and you have a role in that like a puzzle of sorts. But when you're finished crafting a daring stunt, it turns into a cutscene and you don't get to do any of those actions.

I get that the writers have a point to make with their narrative and I'm sure it makes you think. But if the developers think that the narrative will be lost if the player is too distracted by the gameplay, well then the narrative wasn't strong to begin with.
---

Visual novels like ace attorney are slightly different from interactive games like Detroit. I prefer the text heavy ones. I have one imported PSP game and I'm gonna get a vita game imported soon that are dating Sims/ visual novels.

Interactive ones seem very limited because they lack as many conversations, the weight of those is usually diminished greatly even within the chapter they occur, and the game play always feels lacking because they have to shoehorn you through the areas. Visual novels on the other hand let you have choices. "Go to this area or those other 3 ones? The girl I want to romance is there but so is her bully, better back up my save to make sure I get the right decisions." And they can have nuance. For the perfect route you'd need a certain item available at that point to give to that girl, and you have to get her bully to stop. But the dialogue is so much more believable and able to convey how much certain things cause people to respond differently. The best I've seen for responses differing in telltale games is (you choose a response and the game says X liked that, camera pans to Y and they're frowning, pick a different response and X disliked that, Y liked that.)
---

More failed filmmakers are coming into the game industry
---