Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A game studio announced a really funny April Fools’ Day joke. The joke is that they’re taking their characters and putting them in a – get this – visual novel dating sim! How silly! How novel!
I’m so tired of hearing the same boring joke over and over again, and now Palworld developer Pocketpair is getting in on the hilarious visual novel gag with the announcement of Palworld! ~More Than Just Pals~. The dating sim was announced as an April Fools’ Day joke last year with a trailer that didn’t amount to anything until now, as Palworld! ~More Than Just Pals~ gets a new trailer and official Steam page that promises fans the game is actually in development.
The ‘what if we made our game, but did a horny visual novel’ gag is so tired and, honestly, I’m getting a little irritated with it. I like visual novels and I’m sick of them being seen as nothing more than a punchline.
Visual Novels Aren’t Always Like That
Listen, I understand that saying, ‘I like visual novels’ carries a bit of weight and judgment with it. Visual novels are often dismissed as being nothing more than shallow games for horny people looking to speedrun the clothes off anime girls. While, yes, those sorts of games do exist, that’s not what all visual novels are and the best visual novels usually don’t even have those horny elements in them.
The problem with the joke Pocketpair and so many other studios have made about turning their games into visual novels is that it stigmatizes the entire genre as being low-effort horny trash. In reality, some of the best storytelling in all of gaming has come out of visual novels.
The House of Fata Morgana is one of the highest-rated games of all time and is a 40-hour visual novel that tells a deeply moving story. It’s a game that goes toe-to-toe with gothic literature like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
1000xResist isn’t an anime visual novel, but it still falls into the genre with the way that the vast majority of its playtime is spent reading pages of dialogue accompanied by breathtaking vignettes. The game tells one of the most emotionally resonant science fiction stories while tackling important cultural issues and is lauded as one of the best games of 2024.
To be fair, there is a correlation between visual novels and sexy anime ladies because of the common tropes that exist in anime in general; however, it’s reductive to reduce a genre to that one element and write it off entirely. It’s undeniable that there are romance elements in great visual novels like the Steins;Gate and Danganronpa series, but to dismiss them as being nothing but low-effort horny games ignores the incredible writing and other elements that they bring to the table.
You Might Learn Something If You Actually Try
What I find most irritating about the, ‘we’re making a subversive visual novel’ joke is that, when they actually get made, the visual novels usually aren’t subversive. When Blizzard made an Overwatch dating sim, Loverwatch, the game was just a standard low-effort dating sim. I’m sure someone at Blizzard put some effort into it, but the extent of the joke that Blizzard made was, ‘Aren’t these low-effort visual novels so terrible?’ and then all the studio did was release a low-effort visual novel.
Palworld! ~More Than Just Pals~ isn’t out yet, so I can’t say if it’s going to share the same fate as Loverwatch, but based on the trailer, I have zero confidence that it’s going to be anything other than the low-effort trash it’s pretending to be better than.
If Pocketpair really wanted to do something subversive, it should make a good visual novel that examines why studios use them as a joke so often or make a genuinely subversive take on the genre, following the lead of genre-breaking games like Doki Doki Literature Club.
Respecting the genre it’s trying to leverage is the least that Pocketpair could do, especially if it’s going to continue using Zoe Rayne as one of Palworld’s mascot characters, since there are a lot of similarities between the design of Zoe and Junko from Danganronpa, you know, one of the most iconic visual characters of all time? Don’t take it too hard, Spike Chunsoft, Pocketpair has a history of this sort of thing.
Open-World
Shooter
Survival
- Released
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January 19, 2024
- ESRB
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T For Teen Due To Violence