Cool moments in... Visual Novel Design?! Let's Perspective!

The modern visual novel is a curious beast. At times it's the computerised version of a Choose Your Own Adventure game book. At others it's a tool to provide dialogue in an entirely different game genre that can't fit such things in more smoothly. SRPGs for example basically alternate between pure gameplay and visual novel intermissions.

Silly Intelligent Systems. You do the family console release after the PC version with awkwardly placed sex scenes!

 On its own though, it is undoubtedly a medium in its own right. Books can cost-effectively produce any sort of setting and circumstance in a reader's imagination. Visuals novels on the other hand use audiovisual components to concretely establish elements of the narrative. You can use Tolkein's descriptions of hobbits to come up with anything from "garden gnomes with bestial feet" to "drunk guy from Leeds". There's no ambiguity with, say, this guy.

Dr. West is in my brain. He's a part of me. I will never be clean again.

 I've always been in two minds when it comes to voice acting in visual novels. Hearing unambiguous delivery of tone means the writing can focus on quality of the dialogue and ideas presented. It's still sometimes an intrusion on the blanks I'd like my imagination to fill. Sound effects (particularly in Japanese VNs) are often from stock sound banks and thus lend an air of abstraction to them. You're not so much hearing the actual diegetic sound as the concept of what you'd be hearing in that situation. With unique voices, that abstraction is gone.

That last comment about abstraction's important because one of the best parts of VNs as a medium is how well they can handle the internalised perspectives of characters. Books are excellent at this as well and adapting it to visual media is one of the greatest struggles of the process. I feel that comics are in many ways closer to film as a medium since attempts to internalise often come off as cluttering the image.

I'll take any chance to take a potshot at Crisis on Infinite Earths' writing.

 VNs have a consistent location for text to be placed without cluttering the rest of the image. That Demonbane screengrab's a rare example outside of ONScript of writing not reclining at the bottom of the frame. Characters are usually constructed from sprites with set poses and variable faces. It's an efficiency measure that also lends itself to easily presenting the frame as a scene being viewed by the narrator in the writing.

Obviously this isn't a mandatory rule of the medium.It's fine to have third person narration and main characters who have a regular visual presence. This combination of writing to engross a reader while the audiovisual gives clear guidelines is something I feel gives a unique way of getting in a character's head.

The reason I'm bringing all this up today is because I was reading a recent title by ebi-hime entitled Blackberry Honey. In this work, something odd happened.

"Stupid Pauline... Where does she get off, that no-mannered, buck-toothed, horse-faced, conniving bitch!..."

This angry outburst is the earliest example I can recall of the text's villain being described as horse-faced. Numerous characters can't stand her and use the same description. Thing is... here's how she looks.

And for comparison to both a real human regularly described as horse-faced and a stylised literal horse-faced person...

...I'm not really buying the horse description. Her face is a bit angular, but doesn't seem long enough or with enough of a snout-shaped nose here to really come off as an accurate descriptor. I could blame this all on the work's CG artist. I could also just fire off a couple of tweets and see what the creators' response is. Instead I'll go all Death of the Author for a moment and give another interpretation.

As I said before, visual novels can use writing to plant ideas in the reader's mind that are then grounded by the audiovisual. Tying this to a seeming contradiction in the data, we've got something interesting. Since the text's protagonist is given physical presence in the frame, we can conclude we're seeing the world from an objective perspective. Lorina's thoughts then recontextualise that information. Pauline isn't particularly horse-like, but her attitude means Lorina sees her as one.

Is this a particularly profound moment? Not really. I do think it's a technique that could really be expanded upon that's unique to visual novels as a medium. I'm reminded of the Hisui Route in Tsukihime, where the protagonist is mostly bed-ridden and being slipped hallucinogens.

Yeah, this one.

There's just enough visual information to give the reader hints of what's really going on while Shiki's high as a kite . Yet it never really contradicts his own perception.

I've probably mention before that I'm a big fan of texts that play around with how people perceive reality. This is hardly a technique to be exclusively used for messing with readers though. I think it's a unique way to provide characterisation in a way that merges writing with visual in a subtle yet clear way. It's the sort of unique quality that leaves the visual novel as an untapped medium.










Oh and Blackberry Honey is about gay maids in the Victorian era. It's pretty rad.