The DS family of handhelds is home to a lot of interesting titles, which forgo the traditional gameplay for other elements, such as a story or unique experiences.
“Book games” are among these. The term can be understood in a couple ways.
One is simply games where you do a lot of reading, like visual novels. Again, (3)DS has a lot of these, such as the popular Professor Layton series and many others.
Then there are games that make you hold your handheld sideways, like a book. The most well known is Hotel Dusk, that also falls into the first category. But there are a few more, especially Japanese exclusives (see comments under that article).
And third, there are also actual books you can read on the (3)DS, such as 100 Classic Book Collection
I’ve been wanting to play Hotel Dusk for a while, got the cartridge a few years ago but only explored a little. (So use the spoiler tag, please.) While I’m personally not a huge fan of visual novels, the design of (3)DS that allows to get two screens into a handheld, makes it the most practical device for these.
Well, do you like books in your games, or do you prefer the more traditional ones?
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I like the premise, although it is not the best experience for extended sessions I think, the ones that come on top of my mind are:
- Hotel Dusk and its sequel, I’m actually gonna replay Last Window again because I forgot almost everything about the plot lol.
- Ninja Gaiden, I enjoyed it a lot, maybe I have finished it three times or so, I can see die hard fans of Ninja Gaiden not being fans of this title for obvious reasons.
- Inkheart, I played it many moons ago, and even when it was a movie based kind of game I think it did okayish, I mean, I liked the premise of the movie about book characters coming to real life, as a visual novel I think there are some others which are much better though.
I knew there was a horrific-looking movie for Inkheart and I was a fan of the original book, but I didn’t know there was a game adaptation of the film adaptation. Wild!
lol, I didn’t even know there it was a book based movie talking about other book characters that then it got ported to a game, how meta.
You can include all of the Ace Attorney games in the DS visual novel category, and I can thank them for gatewaying me into visual novels in general. Also throwing in 999 since it wasn’t mentioned yet and is great.
I far prefer visual novels to real books. Visual novels allow for more “showing not telling” of an environment and a character’s mood, allowing you to sort of “skip” all the stage setting description of an environment, though a developer can totally insert more description if they like, so it lets them control the pacing more tightly.
The controlled “dialogue box by dialogue box” progression of a traditional visual novel also allows for tight control of the reveal of information. I’m sure many people can relate to reading a book, and accidentally reading a section far ahead they didn’t intend to while flipping to an incorrect page. This box by box approach allows interesting games like Doki Doki Literature Club to reveal information deliberately and immediately for maximum impact, where a book may reveal a twist if the reader happens to glance further down the page.
I also find having character art/voice acting helps me to remember and separate different characters more easily than just using my own memory and imagination, half a benefit, half a symptom of my smooth brain.
Unless character skin, hair, eye colors etc. are specifically described in a book they tend to just become a homogenized blob of generic person in my head, and I’ve read books where I formed a mental image of a character, only for a line to be dropped later that causes me to have to change what they looked like in my head. The weight of the imagination on the experience of books can in that way be a blessing and a curse.
There are also lots of visual novels with exceptional soundtracks that heavily aid the atmosphere and emotion in a game, such as Ace Attorney, or Danganronpa. This introduction of other media to the format can also be taken further towards games like the ever cult popular Persona series in which RPG turn based gameplay is fused with time management, choice, and heavy visual novel elements, to varying effect. Though the soundtracks are always bangin’.
As much as visual novels can aid the experience, they can also let it down in more ways than books. A book really just needs to deliver on its premise, and a writing style and story that the reader enjoys. A visual novel must satisfy in story, writing style, music, gameplay (if any), visual style, voice acting (if any), etc.
And, due to their higher degree of complexity, visual novels are often more expensive than books to boot.
