Visual Novel

A visual novel (Japanese: ビジュアルノベル, Hepburn: bijuaru noberu), often abbreviated as VN, is a form of digital semi-interactive fiction. Visual novels are often associated with and used in video games, but are not always labeled as such themselves.[1][2] They combine a textual narrative with static or animated illustrations and a varying degree of interactivity. The format is more rarely referred to as novel game, a retranscription of the wasei-eigo term noberu gēmu (ノベルゲーム), which is more often used in Japanese.[3] Visual novels originated in and are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006.[4] In Japanese, a distinction is often made between visual novels (NVL, from "novel"), which consist primarily of narration and have very few interactive elements, and adventure games (AVG or ADV, from "adventure"), which incorporate problem-solving and other types of gameplay. This distinction is normally lost outside Japan, as both visual novels and adventure games are commonly referred to as "visual novels" by international fans.... Fan-created novel games are reasonably popular; there are a number of free game engines and construction kits aimed at making them easy to construct, most notably NScripter, KiriKiri and Ren'Py. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel

• Visual novels with non-branching plots, such as Higurashi When They Cry, Muv-Luv Alternative, and Digital: A Love Story are known as kinetic novels.[6][11] The term was first used by the publisher Key for their title Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet.
• There are role-playing video games that feature visual novel-style elements. A well-known example in the West is Mistwalker's Lost Odyssey, an RPG that features a series of visual novel-style flashback sequences called "A Thousand Years of Dreams".
• In recent times, some visual novels have been developed mainly in English, and intended for an English-speaking audience, notable examples being Doki Doki Literature Club! and VA-11 HALL-A. Other languages have been the focus in visual novels, including Spanish, French, Russian and Mandarin, which have seen increased success due to the popularity of the genre.