#5

Pictured: Higuarshi No Naku Koro Ni

I decided to write a paper on the topic of Visual Novels. As visual novels are often debated whether or not they're actually games or not, I decided to cover what generally falls under the visual novel genre, as well as briefly whether or not they are actually games or just fancy digital novels with sound and sometimes voice acting. I covered sound/kinetic novels, VNLs, and ADVs, as well as different genres that generally fall under the visual novel category such as: dating sims or adult content, "crying games," horror, and science fiction. I initially was also going to cover different software used to make visual novels, but the paper was becoming lengthy, and I felt I was covering too much at that point. It was hard to extensively cover whether or not to consider them as actual games thanks to the lack of articles covering it, and I mostly found forum posts covering this topic. Unfortunately, it was really hard to find articles on the subject, and many of them referenced each other. My actual paper is linked here.