Visual Novels...oh man. [NSFW]

Visual novels. They hold some infamy among internet culture. Not really games, more computer novel. The vast majority of them come from the Japanese market and very few have gained notice outside of Japan, and even less have gotten attention off the fact that there is, more often then not, a lot of sexual situations in them. Copulation! How scandalous. While some games like the Phoenix Wright series, Hotel Dusk, and Trace Memory are all great examples of enjoyable, funny, and genuinely interesting, these are the exceptions I'm talking about. This is a big assumption from someone pretty ignorant on the subject, but a vast majority of visual novels shown around tend to not be more then a lot of blatant smut.

I have, however, plated through one. Melty Blood is a fighting game series spun off from Tsukihime. I played Tsukihime because I had genuine interest in where the characters were from. The story was cool and I got a good novel out it, something that I felt the adult content only impeded. I enjoyed it as a novel, which made me thing at the time that there were some of these that really tried to tell a good story, but this was years ago and I didn't consider it since.

There is a forum I go to on a regular basis that...isn't exactly the height of intelligent conversation. I've been on it for five years tho and it's hard to leave when so many things get talked about. About four weeks ago in the video game section, someone brought up a visual novel they played called Yume Miru Kusuri. The thread bombed pretty hard. Check it here (NSFW). The first response sealed it's fate pretty well. For a few pages it became a breeding ground for trolls. Then a few people who decided to play the game came out and started to talk about it in a positive light, saying that it was pretty good storytelling and, like I said about Tsukihime, the adult content tended to detract from it. I don't know this, I didn't play it. While I did argue for the idea that it could be a good story (I'm "Banned?" in that thread), I also really did not want the trolls and flamers to win that conversation.

This is what I'm talking about.

So...

Could visual novels actually be an output for great story?


Sure.

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I would have totally posted this on Japanator is it had a blog section, as it really has little to do with video games, but I assume we can still get some kind of interesting conversation out of it.


EDIT: Hidden and reposted because I actually started writing it four hours ago and that bumped it down as soon as it was made viewable.