Mightyblue’s Corner

It’s an odd sort of question really.
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For those of you who don’t know, one of the “innovations” that Japan wrought upon the computer scene was the visual novel. If you compound the original words’ meanings, you’ll be pretty close. If you think of a more traditional adventure game or something along the lines of the Myst series with about a metric ton of text you’d have a visual novel as well. Some focus more on wandering around and “player” choices, while others focus far more on the storyline. Others focus more on undressing the ladies and having your virtual way with them. Sadly, with Japan there are a lot more of the porno “hentai” games (actually visual novels with a lot of porn content). In Japan though, they don’t use the “hentai” title for porn, “hentai” being the nicer JP word for “pervert.” Anything with “ero” attached to it is likely gravure or straight porn of some sort, and given that Japan doesn’t have a sexually repressed culture behind the wheel, there’s a lot more of it out there.
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Anyway, there is a difference between ero-novels and visual novels that contain some nudity/sex/gravure images in them, and you can mainly tell the difference by the cover art, actually. The tamer dating-sims and mostly-straight visual novels won’t have any, uh, risque box art or screenies on the back, and you can probably imagine that the eroge (JP term for porno games/vis. novels, rootword ero-geemu) boxart isn’t quite so restrained. Considering that porn is all about instant gratification (or however long it takes to, uh, entertain yourself), sandwiching said material between largish chunks of text isn’t exactly efficient, and so most people on either side of the Pacific leave the really porn-ish (ooh, invented a word) stuff alone.
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Setting aside Japan’s large pervert subculture for a moment with the rightful observation that true eroge are a largish fragment of Japan’s porn industry and a smallish chunk of the overall vis-novel market, we move onto the real vis-novels. Visual novels are insanely popular, even the ones who include teensy bits of sex and nudity, and they’re so popular that even the slightly less risque ones are ported to your console of choice sans the risque bits. They also tend to have very low system requirements, so most people with a computer less than ten years old, or have access to a PS2 can play/read/whatever a vis-novel in their free time. In most of them you can save your spot wherever, so you can pick up where you left off at some other time. While the eroge generally have C and D-grade porno stories, some of the visual novels actually approach something resembling excellence and originality, and the studios responsible for them have approached or far exceeded Rockstar status in terms of popularity and fame.
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The vast majority of it is crap, and comprised of the usual cliches that Japanese pop culture has been circulating for the last thirty or forty years, but some of the really popular stuff can inspire even new cliches that transfer over into video games and other forms of mass culture. That’s really something considering that Japan is basically a house of cliches stacked so thoroughly on each other that if you start to remove some of the oldest and most popular ones the country would probably implode. Thankfully, the medium hasn’t intruded too far over here, but so far only dubiously translated and localized eroge are available here through the fine auspices of Peach Princess and J-List. You can also get a large amount of morally dubious Japanese crap through J-List as well, although I’ve so far resisted the urge to get a Domo-kun hat. *cough*
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ANYWAY, tl;dr version: Visual novels are popular. Some are porn, most are slightly porn-ish, and all are extremely popular and can be played on your toaster or clothes washer with extra vibration function for eroge!*
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This post sponsored by the author paying way too much for a copy of Utawaremono a few years back, hooked by the intrigue of a visual novel with a good story, light amounts of the good stuff, and with a good SRPG muxed in to boot. Also sponsored by the fan-tl patch for Uta that just got released a month ago!
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Joy, for I am Nerd.
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*This is an absolute falsehood. Hopefully. Really Hopefully.