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What If It Were a Film or Novel? To understand the emotional structure of visual novels, I needed a point of comparison. Other media that handle the same subject — relationships and emotions between people. Films and novels. I asked AI: "What's the difference in how films, novels, and visual novels each deliver emotion?" Then I combined the analysis with my own experience. Film: Emotion Under Time Control Film controls time. Within a fixed two hours, the director decides everything. How long to show a scene, when to bring in music, where the camera looks. The audience surrenders to the flow. This control is film's strength. At exactly the moment the director wants, they can produce exactly the emotion they intended. When the camera lingers on a character's eyes during a sad scene, the music swells, silence extends — the audience's emotions follow almost automatically. I think of Christmas in August. The emotion this film creates is "regret for what ...

Why Can't Other Games Draw Out Emotion? We've analyzed why emotion emerges in visual novels. The reverse question follows naturally: why can't other games do the same? Of course, "can't" is an overstatement. People have cried playing The Last of Us, felt their chest tighten in Final Fantasy. But those emotions mostly come from cutscenes or story events. It's rare for the gameplay itself to produce relationship emotions. Why? AI and I dug deep into this topic. Games' Basic Structure Clashes with Emotion Most games are built on a challenge-reward structure. Defeat enemies for experience, complete quests for rewards, clear stages to progress. The emotions this produces are achievement, tension, thrill. Intense, but different in texture from relationship emotions. Relationship emotions sit at the opposite end of efficiency. Liking someone is inefficient. Anxious, irrational, uncontrollable. The challenge-reward structure fundamentally conflicts with ...

Why Do People Play Visual Novels? My kid asked, "What happens if I pick something bad?" When I said "It might make you sad," they asked, "Why?" Why would it make you sad? The character on screen doesn't exist. The dialogue is text someone wrote in advance. The choices are just programmed branches. It's all fake — so why do the emotions feel real? This is a question that must be understood before building a visual novel. If you don't know why emotions occur, you can't design them. I Asked AI First "Why do people feel emotions in visual novels?" The question I threw at Claude. AI produced several keywords: parasocial relationships, self-projection, narrative immersion, player agency. The summary: Parasocial Relationship — A one-sided relationship that feels real. The same structure as feeling close to a TV celebrity. Visual novel characters fall into this category. Self-Projection — The player places themselves in the prot...

The Games I Used to Play After deciding to make a visual novel, something strange happened. Before looking into how to build one, the games I used to play surfaced first. To understand a genre, you analyze its structure. AI can handle that. But "why this genre pulls people in" isn't something analysis can answer. That was stored in memory. The First Visual Novel I Played I can't remember exactly when. Probably high school. On a friend's computer, or at my desk in my own room. There are games whose titles I can't quite recall. Games that would turn up with a search, probably. But it's not the titles that stuck — it's the feeling. I remember the setting was a school. Characters in a classroom. Lunch breaks. After-school hours. When a choice appeared, I'd pause and think. Which option would this character like? What dialogue would follow? I saved and loaded over and over, trying different choices. Looking back, it's almost laughable. Agonizi...