Giving Visual Novels a Chance in the West

You are right, there are many visual novel style games that are fairly popular on various systems, some of these crossed my mind. The intent of the article wasn't particularly to say, "Hey, look at this and look at that, these are good!" I guess it was more to say the style of storytelling and depth of some stories are good in the genre overall.

Also, at least to some extent, I was trying to point out why Western gamers should be interested in some of these titles and not point fingers at the ones that worked and say, "Hey, you liked this one, what is wrong with all these others?"

Part of the issue is with localization. I really think that some of these titles would sell well if they're localized on the PSP or PS2. Maybe not the high-end systems, as that may be too expensive for the publisher. It is partially the publisher's responsibility to try to widen out a certain audience's exposure to these niche genres, and, of course, they won't do that unless the idea is financially sound, unfortunately.

But you are right, there are a few specific franchises that appeal to Western gamers that would hopefully be a stepping stone to get more of those types of games over here.

While I agree that on a technical level there are games that can be considered visual novels that have been successful here it's kind of misleading.

When you say the words visual novel most will picture games like Fate/Stay Night, Clannad, Air, Shuffle, Little Busters, Tsukihime, Snow Sakura and the like.

Games like those have never been successful on a main stream level. Alot of that is because most of those games have adult material in them and most people can't seem to accept that most of the time it's not exploitative and that it actually adds to the games(R rated movies have sex scenes and no one freaks about that.)

Even looking past that almost all of the games mentioned above(with the exception of Tsukihime) had console versions with all of the adult material removed and still they were never brought to the US. There are clearly markets for these games as the anime they inspired are quite popular here. Fate/Stay Night and Clannad for example have great fan followings in the US and yet have never seen the original games that inspired the anime released in the US.

So while it certainly is true that games like Phoenix Wright could technically mean visual novel it's also not what most could think off when mentioning visual novels and those that the games that need to be given a chance in the US.

This looks pretty interesting cotter, do you have any others to recommend?