What makes a Japanese dating sim/adventure game/novel game, anyway?
This post originally ran on Cohost on 2022/7/27 and is being reuploaded here for future posterity. Images have been added to improve the flow and the content has also been lightly edited for enhanced readability.
Seeing as I'm in the process of finding an actual, not-Airbnb sort of place to stay in Japan so I can have things like, say, a local bank account and a working cell phone number, I can't say I'm gonna be especially talkative on here for the next couple of weeks, at least compared to my normal activity on Twitter. But, I still wanna post stuff that makes this account different from my other antics elsewhere since I haven't really had a place to post longer form text that isn't my Medium blog, which isn't something I like to use for stuff I write off the cuff. So to break this account in, let's talk about one of the (egg)bugbears that looms over a lot of my coverage: what the hell makes a dating sim a dating sim in my book and what makes them different from those similar-looking adventure and novel games of the visual/sound variety you also find from Japan?
First, an extremely brief history lesson. Aside from and in addition to RPGs, lots of Japanese gameplay and storytelling design is derived in some fashion from domestic adventure games. While these days in a native Japanese context, the term "adventure" is often synonymous with novel games, what I'm referring to are adventure games in a historical sense that's more familiar to folks outside of Japan. I'm talking text parsers, point-and-clicks, and menu-driven affairs. Though most prevalent on Japanese PCs, if you've played stuff like the recent Famicom Detective Club remake, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, or Phoenix Wright, you've played a Japanese adventure game and have a basic idea of the general framework for the genre. As another genre pioneered by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii early in his career, suffice it to say, it's historically been a big deal to many, many narrative-focused developers there, even if the rate of new output has slowed down to a trickle from a handful of developers these days.
At any rate, it's best to think of Japanese adventure games as both a distinct genre and also a wider umbrella encompassing other writing-heavy genres, as their presentation and overall flow tend to be derived heavily from adventure games. Think of the Japanese adventure game therefore as a circus tent, one full of other rowdy and sometimes messy narrative games, whether that narrative comes predominantly from gameplay or more from prose and structure. It's after the initial genesis and growth of these original adventure games that folks overseas tend to lose the thread about the directions in which they branched out and how.
In a nutshell, starting in the early to mid-90s, both novel games and dating sims began to arise in parallel to one another. Developers like Chunsoft (as in, the people making little games like Dragon Quest and Shiren the Wanderer) were putting out foundational sound novel titles—we'll get to that distinction later—like Otogirisou and Kamaitachi no Yoru, while a misfit group of developers largely ignored at Konami churned out Tokimeki Memorial, a game released to little expectation and anticipation from both the publisher and players alike. That is, until it become such a vital cornerstone to the establishment Japanese dating sims as a legitimate genre that it remains to this day the best-selling game of its kind across its myriad ports at over a million copies sold, even nearly three decades later. It's actually in these early days before novel games and dating sims start to cross-pollinate with one another that the distinctions between these genres are the clearest. So let's go ahead and spell out those differences as viewed by Japanese players and critics, which are generally also the definitions I myself abide by when talking about these games online:
Adventure games: Relatively analogous to historical western adventure games, whether they're text parsers (basically extinct past the mid-80s), point-and-click (more common, especially Hideo Kojima's games), or menu/command-driven (most common).
Dating sims: Games with an overt structure and defined gameplay meta with a general goal of entering into a relationship with a character. Essentially, a dating sim is a dating sim if there are mechanics of some sort that players must strategize around in order to achieve their goal, which can often come in the form of stats and calendar/time management, among many other flavors.
Novel games: Games that reinvent the prose reading experience using tools and technology made possible only by video games as a medium. Sound novels, devised by Chunsoft, were the first major kind, getting their name from the fact that their games were like reading books, but had soundtracks and sound effects for enhanced ambience in addition to background images displayed behind the main text. As games got more advanced and things like voice acting became more common, the tools that these developers had at their disposal to redefine what it meant to read within a game expanded accordingly.
This is still greatly simplifying the general traits and evolutionary trajectories of each genre, but hopefully my brief descriptions are still sufficient enough to demonstrate that, within their native context especially, these monikers are not synonymous or used interchangeably, as they often mistakenly are in English discussions. That being said, it's worth emphasizing at this point that while dating sims and novel games emerged around roughly the same period, initially there was little mingling between them and developers/games within those respective genres worked in relative isolation from one another. I say this because while people outside of Japan tend to think of dating sims as possessing linear narrative progression like novel games (hence the confusion, at least in part), in the early years, they actually tended to favor mechanics-based storytelling over more prescribed affairs. The rhythms and ups-and-downs of a given run in these dating sims constitute the bulk of the plot, letting players infer the details themselves by way of suggested and imagined implications of various gameplay events, some fixed and others determined by RNG. Even as these games eventually began to adopt more set story routes, sometimes to great success as in the case of games like Amagami, that fluidity to take ownership of a given relationship's trajectory, successful or not, has always remained in dating sims. This direct gameplay investment is what ultimately sets dating sims apart from novel games in particular.
Novel games also got their start thanks in large part to a major console developer by way of Chunsoft. However, by and large, the biggest, most important early entries came from the PC scene, where it was embraced as a new storytelling paradigm that was fostered separately from mainstream Japanese games. Whereas the adventure games from which they descended had significantly matured as a genre and boasted tried-and-true storytelling techniques depending on the gameplay format and type of story, the form and function of novel games were still being hashed out from scratch throughout the 90s. As a result, novel games served as a less reliable source of inspiration for some time for developers working in other genres.
This includes dating sims, which in the case of Tokimeki Memorial and its immediate progeny trace their roots not just to adventure games specifically, but also RPGs and especially PC-style simulation games (as in the number-crunching kind; think Nobunaga's Ambition or Civilization). Indeed, the sim part of "dating sim" was, historically speaking, intended to be taken quite literally, the Japanese terminology itself, renai simulation, even translating to "romance simulation," which I'd argue more aptly distills the content and premise of most such games.
The sales numbers and returns on novel games were typically magnitudes less than the most successful dating sims and their associated merchandising empires. Given the adult and sexual content of many novel games, their general exclusivity to PC platforms, and the comparative lack of computer literacy among the Japanese buying public compared to other developed nations, this niche status is to be expected. Outside of Chunsoft, few major Japanese publishers or developers ever entered the visual novel business. Indeed, games that are often seen overseas as being visual novels like Phoenix Wright are, in fact, marketed domestically as adventure games in that traditional sense because to some degree, those differences in market audiences and, arguably, pedigree remain.
Before wrapping up this post, it's also worth quickly breaking down the differences between the two main flavors of Japanese novel games, namely sound and visual novels. In my own observation, these distinctions tend to be even harder for folks outside Japan to readily pinpoint, likely due to the disjointed localization history for those games and the manner in which they've proliferated overseas. These are differences are helpful to know, though, because for all of the superficial similarities that they share, they're ultimately two very different kinds of experiences. So here's my take on the basic philosophical and presentational differences between the two:
Sound novels: As stated before, these tend to focus on presenting a more traditional prose reading experience while bringing to bear the additional strengths of telling such stories on game hardware specifically, as exemplified by their preference to present entire paragraphs of text at a time on the screen. The earliest entries of sound novels followed Chunsoft's example of relying on background imagery and ambient audio, either having no on-screen characters or, in the iconic case of Kamaitachi no Yoru, employing silhouettes to encourage players to still use their imagination. Many games do have defined character portraits that are displayed on screen, but the narrative thrust remains the prose itself, perhaps enhanced through some clever programming scripting to enhance immersion (eg: deliberating timing the pace of text displays to emulate a character's thought patterns, etc.).
Visual novels: Originally synonymous with sound novels and was coined simply to get around Chunsoft's trademark ownership of the term "sound novel" itself. Visual novels come in many flavors, but tend to downplay overt prose in flavor of storytelling progression primarily by way of dialogue and in-character narration. To that effect, text is confined to an isolated text box, rather than occupying the full real estate of the screen in order to, indeed, place a greater spotlight on visual elements such as character sprites and intricately drawn background images. Nevertheless, visual novels can also feature scripting for various purposes, such as to give characters light animation routines. If sound novels are e-books with extra programming and background audio, visual novels are akin to a series of storyboards accompanied by a TV or movie script. Though rarely talked about, the argument can be made that they're pretty directly descended from a mostly defunct form of Japanese entertainment known as kamishibai.
All of this is why if you ask me to define what it is that I write about, I'll always be particular in saying my interest is in covering traditional dating sims within the parameters I've described here. I don't refer to my coverage as being about visual novels because historically, novel games and dating sims have existed in two separate lanes. It's not for a lack of personal interest in or appreciation for novel games; I just think that the philosophy of dating sims to reorient player motivations towards emotional end goals using largely systemic means is a fascinating one that hasn't been explored nearly as thoroughly overseas as they should. To use developer jargon, dating sims by their nature employ different "verbs" from any other genre, ones that are more or less wholly unique to them, and as Tokimeki Memorial itself demonstrated as a dyed-in-the-wool Konami game as I've previously discussed, they can often do so without forsaking their medium. They employ design and narrative tricks you'll find in other genres, just repurposed to other ends. It's both the success and failures of those attempts that continues to capture my attention all these years later.
Anyway, there's my basic breakdown of how to tell these admittedly similar-looking Japanese genres apart. While I've sometimes gotten pushback on Twitter asking why I'm so prescriptive and can't simply accept that these genres have become synonymous in western spheres, in my eyes, lumping all of these games together too liberally simply because they have some shared DNA and basic presentational similarities removes them from conversations and design movements they were intended to participate in during their release. Decisions about genre and the subsequent impact on structure and mechanics were made deliberately and I feel it ultimately leads to a more enriching examination of these games when we take the time to appreciate those differences on their native terms. Put another way, even though they have indeed cross-polinated in some significant ways, dating sims and visual novels remain so distinct from one another in terms of structure, flow, and mechanical emphases that it would be unwise to think that a person deeply into one genre will automatically enjoy the other. I would never recommend Tokimeki Memorial to someone who likes, say, Stein's;Gate just because they both happen to feature text boxes and anime portraits. Experientially, the spheres that these two games otherwise occupy are profoundly apart and offer fundamentally different sensations when played.
It's a hill that I know I can't count on many people dying on with me in the short-term, which is okay. For all of my reservations about categorizing these games as one cohesive thing when they functionally aren't, I understand how it happened and am sympathetic to how, without additional coverage and more games properly localized, it can be tremendously difficult for non-Japanese speakers to tell them apart. Ultimately, I feel my role is to advocate for dating sims and what makes them unique as games first and foremost and can only hope that I find the words and methods to draw more attention to these distinctions over time. So if this post helped you make better sense of what I've been going on about for the last five years in particular, I'll consider that a victory in itself.
