Does forcing gameplay into visual novels ruin some of the impact?

I'd like to keep this discussion spoiler-free if possible.

I just finished the Walking Dead and had a fantastic time. The story was good, the characters were memorable, and most of the dialogue was believable. It wasn't perfect, of course, but it really hit the spectrum of emotions. I'm also in the middle of 999 (have a couple of the endings done), and I also think the story in that game is very interesting. I want to learn more about the characters, how they fit together, and what's going on.

The reason I bring those games up is that I feel like I would have had a better time with TWD and would be having a better time with 999 if there was less gameplay. Walking around and solving puzzles in Walking Dead just didn't interest me that much. They streamlined a lot of it compared to most adventure games, but I mostly plowed through those sections to get to more dialogue. With 999, I'm having the same problem (even worse) where I find that the puzzle rooms just aren't all that interesting (especially considering you can't skip them in subsequent replays). I'll probably finish the game just because the story is so interesting, but I actually stopped playing (after going at it nonstop this past weekend) because I didn't want to tackle a 20 minute puzzle room for the 3rd time.

So, how do you guys feel about games like these? Do you feel like developers are maybe trying too hard to make them feel like "games" by forcing a lot of shoddy gameplay in there, or do you feel that the gameplay fits and that a visual novel by itself would just not stand on its own?

I haven't played 999 but have no interest in it and don't consider it a "real game".. if it had no gameplay then at I'd least be able to treat it as a digital manga and actually might be more interested.

I'm sure OP is onto something. It's one thing that puzzles are garbage in general, but even then what person who would play a game that is 90+ percent story wouldn't want it to be 100 percent story?

p.s. what is this pic from? It doesnt look like a DS screenshot.

Well, the puzzles in 999 were not particularly hard and I feel the developers made them that way on purpose. I enjoyed the puzzles because they were all nice and short. But my favorite aspect of the game was the story. I haven't played a game with such a tightly written story (despite some plot holes) in a long time. If the story was lacking, I wouldn't have even continued to play the game. Wait till you get to the ending TC.

The game makes me wish all video game stories were as creative and well written as it. Then again, maybe I'm expecting too much from JRPGs.

I often question why Visual Novels are video games at all, I dont think it being contained on a DS etc. enhances it and I would be a lot happier if it was just on a bit of paper or a non-interactive movie. At least with adventure games you get some choice as to you are going to proceed, in older adventure games especially there was a lot of humour to failing.

Walking Dead isn't a visual novel, it involves animation and the gameplay is some of the greatest parts, even though it's not very involving it wouldn't be the same game without it. Like rushing down the stairs to warn people they are eating people, chopping the guys leg off. Walking though that horde of zombies towards the end.

@thebignasty: I could understand your point if you were talking about Persona 3 FES and Persona 3 Portable, but 999 was built from the ground up as "interactive fiction": a video game which is mainly focused on the narrative aspect, with some light puzzling along the way. Sure, the escape puzzles are not particularly hard, but that's not the aim of the game. The rooms are designed so everyone can escape from them. That's a basic premise from the in-game logic. There would no thematic consistency if the player got stuck in several of these rooms and needed "outside help" (i.e. a FAQ or a forum thread). Besides, the way the puzzles work is deeply rooted in how the universe works in 999 so...

I don't think that game is a good example, apart from not being what you want it to be. P3P, on the other hand, yeah, pretty much sums up your feelings. And I would have to agree with you on that one, if you had actually cited it as an example. The difference between FES and P3P is staggering: no 3D models, a lot less voicework, no anime cutscenes, no moving around your character in real time... Even with that, I prefer playing P3P. Navigating a menu to move from place to place is much faster than having to actually walk there :P

@egg said:

I haven't played 999 but have no interest in it and don't consider it a "real game".. if it had no gameplay then at I'd least be able to treat it as a digital manga and actually might be more interested.

I'm sure OP is onto something. It's one thing that puzzles are garbage in general, but even then what person who would play a game that is 90+ percent story wouldn't want it to be 100 percent story?

I wouldn't. I like the balance between exposition and puzzles, especially in Virtue's Last Reward (from where that screenshot comes, BTW). Escaping from a room feels rewarding, knowning that more answers are waiting for you past that door. Don't write off the game simply because it's not your cup of tea.

Also, I don't understand why you wouldn't consider 999/VLR a "real game". How is your definition of what a "real game" is so precise and graded that it can leave out 999? It is presented in a "virtual" form, accessible mostly through sight and hearing, so it fits the "video" part. It also requires a certain degree of player agency to move the story forward, unlike movies, so it also fits the "game" part. Why is it not a "real" game? What are "real" games for you?

@Pazy said:

I often question why Visual Novels are video games at all, I dont think it being contained on a DS etc. enhances it and I would be a lot happier if it was just on a bit of paper or a non-interactive movie. At least with adventure games you get some choice as to you are going to proceed, in older adventure games especially there was a lot of humour to failing.

The same here. It's not the genre that determines what a video game is, but the medium.

@JoeyRavn said:

Also, I don't understand why you wouldn't consider 999/VLR a "real game". How is your definition of what a "real game" is so precise and graded that it can leave out 999? It is presented in a "virtual" form, accessible mostly through sight and hearing, so it fits the "video" part. It also requires a certain degree of player agency to move the story forward, unlike movies, so it also fits the "game" part. Why is it not a "real" game? What are "real" games for you?

hence why I put the phrase "real game" in quotation marks in my post. Actually I was treating "real game" as a concept defining the snarky dismissive opinion many gamers evidently have. (often referring to things like casual games, mobile games, educational games, kinect games, or whatever else) You broke down the term "video game" in literal terms, but the term "real game" is not literal but cultural.

But really now, surely it can be understood why I wouldn't consider 999 a real game. The genre it belongs to is actually referred to as "visual novel". What else is there to say really.

btw thanks for pointing out where that screenshot is from. x) Me go look it up now.

the puzzles in 999 are integral to the story it's trying to tell. Most of the are fairly simply and incorporated well into the story, so I think the game would lose a lot of its meaning without them.

Yeah I don't get how The Walking Dead can be considered a visual novel at all. The game is built around player choice and allowing them to sway the narrative and motivations of characters. I guess maybe at a stretch it's like a visual choose-your-own-adventure story?

@LackingSaint said:

Yeah I don't get how The Walking Dead can be considered a visual novel at all. The game is built around player choice and allowing them to sway the narrative and motivations of characters. I guess maybe at a stretch it's like a visual choose-your-own-adventure story?

Mmm...while it basically is a VN, the one thing that completely stops it from being a visual novel...is the novel part. Visual novels usually involve more reading, a lot of reading, and they tend to describe what's happening rather than show you. There's very little reading in The Walking Dead, especially so if you don't have subtitles.

@egg said:

I'm sure OP is onto something. It's one thing that puzzles are garbage in general, but even then what person who would play a game that is 90+ percent story wouldn't want it to be 100 percent story?

It would cease being a game altogether, just a series of cutscenes that we choose between. I'm not saying there's no market at all for such a thing, but I think most people who favor a game with a lot of story (and I think I'm one of these) want at least some engagement beyond the story. We want at least some challenge and interaction. TWD without those brief moments of tense gameplay would not have had the emotional impact that it did. Remove them, and it's just not the same. TWD might not have had much gameplay, but those bits that it did have were--in my opinion--crucial to the experience.

@LackingSaint said:

Yeah I don't get how The Walking Dead can be considered a visual novel at all. The game is built around player choice and allowing them to sway the narrative and motivations of characters. I guess maybe at a stretch it's like a visual choose-your-own-adventure story?

I don't like the term "visual novel" for these sorts of things, since I think it gives the wrong impression. These things are still interactive in ways that novels and movies aren't. They're something completely different. We still "play" them in a sense, and so they're still "games" as opposed to novels and movies, which are completely passive experiences. We don't have a word yet that does them justice, which is why when most people call these things "visual novels" they mean it as a put-down, of sorts (not everyone, obviously).

It's still a game. It's a different sort of game, but it's not a novel. It's not a movie. It's more than a choose-your-own-adventure. I'm not sure exactly what it ought to be called.

@egg said:

hence why I put the phrase "real game" in quotation marks in my post. Actually I was treating "real game" as a concept defining the snarky dismissive opinion many gamers evidently have. (often referring to things like casual games, mobile games, educational games, kinect games, or whatever else) You broke down the term "video game" in literal terms, but the term "real game" is not literal but cultural.

But really now, surely it can be understood why I wouldn't consider 999 a real game. The genre it belongs to is actually referred to as "visual novel". What else is there to say really.

Yeah, people offend disregard some genres as not "core" genres. But, then again, what defines a video game is not the genre, but the medium. Whether it's called "visual novel" or "super engaging action virtual reality" is of no consequence: "video games" are a container in which everything, from Katawa Shoujo to Super Hexagon, have their own place.

Would you say that Twilight is less of a novel than War and Peace? No. It's nowhere as good, but it's still a novel, regardless of how it's culturally perceived. The same goes for movies. The latest Adam Sandler comedy is a movie in the same way that The Godfather is a movie. Or for music: both Bach and Justin Bieber are musicians, no matter how good one is or how bad the other one is. Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of Time, Just Dance and 999 are all video games. Of different genres, sure, and some of them involve the player more than the others, but they are all video games.

@Shirogane said:

Mmm...while it basically is a VN, the one thing that completely stops it from being a visual novel...is the novel part. Visual novels usually involve more reading, a lot of reading, and they tend to describe what's happening rather than show you. There's very little reading in The Walking Dead, especially so if you don't have subtitles.

So... what you're trying to say is that it's not a visual novel? Yes, it's not. But, really, how you call a genre or how you classify a game doesn't matter. The game is what it is, a video game, whether people want to accept it or like it, or not.

@JoeyRavn: Perhaps visual novel was a bad choice of words. I think interactive fiction is more applicable. I'm definitely not saying that there weren't some valid pieces of gameplay that helped the story in TWD, but there were some pieces that felt forced in there. For example (trying to avoid spoilers), in the 3rd episode, that train puzzle sequence was god-awful. Both before and after it gets moving. They were long, too much walking back and forth was involved, and just felt like fillers; however, that episode had very little gameplay before that, so it was like Telltale felt like they had to put some in there to mix things up or balance out the episode a little bit. Episode 5 is a great example for me. I felt there was just enough gameplay to make things interesting, but not so much that I felt like they were dragging it out. I was fine with that episode being shorter than the others because it felt so much tighter.

With 999, I'm not saying the puzzle rooms don't add to the story, but they really aren't that great. I'm fine with the developer's ideas of having them in there and forcing you to escape them, but then you escape and "oh crap" here's another room. Maybe it's just the fact that you have to replay them so much that really gets under my skin. I felt like the balance the first time through was pretty good. Probably 2 hours or so of puzzle solving and 3-4 hours of story. But on subsequent replays, that becomes 1.5 hours of puzzle solving and 1.5 hours (which is a generous estimate) of story.

They could've just made Asura's Wrath all cutscene, but the QTEs connect you just enough that it makes it more fun. Sure, the parts where you bash a zombie in TWD are nigh unfailable, but like AW, it connects you to the actions of the character.

I wouldn't consider TWD a VN.

999 is a weird case where I'm not sure if it's more of a puzzle game or more of a VN. I guess it can be both?

@thebignasty said:

With 999, I'm not saying the puzzle rooms don't add to the story, but they really aren't that great. I'm fine with the developer's ideas of having them in there and forcing you to escape them, but then you escape and "oh crap" here's another room. Maybe it's just the fact that you have to replay them so much that really gets under my skin. I felt like the balance the first time through was pretty good. Probably 2 hours or so of puzzle solving and 3-4 hours of story. But on subsequent replays, that becomes 1.5 hours of puzzle solving and 1.5 hours (which is a generous estimate) of story.

That's more a game design issue than a genre design issue. Forcing you to replay puzzle sections every time in 999 was a problem (which is why they fixed it in VLR), but that does not mean they should not have existed at all. If there were no interactive sections then you would also miss out on all the incidental dialogue you can get by checking out objects or talking to characters even if you don't need to.

@LackingSaint said:

Yeah I don't get how The Walking Dead can be considered a visual novel at all. The game is built around player choice and allowing them to sway the narrative and motivations of characters. I guess maybe at a stretch it's like a visual choose-your-own-adventure story?

Funnily enough, what you've just described right there is the very definition of a visual novel. And that's why so many gamers are referring to The Walking Dead as a "visual novel": because its main focus is the storytelling, dialogue choices, and narrative decisions (like in a visual novel), departing from the traditional adventure formula which focused more on the puzzles, exploration, and inventory management.

However, unlike most visual novels, The Walking Dead is presented more like an interactive movie (though there are plenty of visual novels also presented like that), and the plot is somewhat more linear than the branching narratives of most visual novels (but again, there are some visual novels which are completely linear).

Personally, I would classify both The Walking Dead and 999 as a kind of hybrid between the visual novel and adventure game genres.