I love visual novels, here’s another blog about why
I have work on today, so sitting here blogging isn’t strictly speaking ideal, but I’ve been having a truly horrific time and suddenly there was a spark, and sometimes, you’ve got to hold onto those. The spark I’m referring to in this case is actually a video game called Arcadia Fallen.
I’ve known about Arcadia Fallen since its initial Steam and Itch release in 2021, but guess what, even though I have lowered my output as a critic ever since working on Mythwrecked to a sensible two games per month on average, working six to seven days a month doesn’t really leave a whole lot of time for private gaming. So I register a lot of games, but unless work gives me an opportunity to play them, it will take luck for me to get to them. Thankfully, this is exactly what happened in this case — Arcadia Fallen has an upcoming PlayStation 5 and 4 release, and I pounced on it. While my review is forthcoming in the lovely PLAY magazine and you should absolutely please support this print magazine I love and the people who work very hard on it, I can spoil my verdict and say I’ve enjoyed Arcadia Fallen very much.
Arcadia Fallen is a visual novel. Now, if you’ve been with me for a minute, you’ll know I love visual novels. Honestly, while I think anyone who writes and enjoys storytelling should give a visual novel a try, I think I just love visual novels because they are an amalgamation of the three things I arguably love most — character design, voice acting and storytelling. This is an undoubtedly good game, but I think I feel a particular affinity for it due to the space (and confines!) it was made in. Arcadia Fallen is an independent Western visual novel with romance options, and this is a field I’ve paid particular attention to over the last few years, so I can’t really help the excitement at releases like it.
In my 2021 GOTY list, I gave my top stop to a visual called When The Night Comes from Lunaris Games, and it is honestly pretty similar to Arcadia Fallen — it is a game born from a subculture we don’t talk about all that often in the West, at least where the mainstream press is concerned. This is part of a wider point, so bear with me while I’m going on a long and dangerously unedited tangent: when I started as a journalist, I was really confused to realise that many Japanese games for example had gained a relatively bad rep — while Japanese RPGs had been so formative for many of us who are now writing, I find that JRPGs, or anything coming out of Japan, is at best politely side-eyed, and visual novels count in that category. Ostensibly that makes sense — we’re only now coming to terms with different ideas of what gameplay can be, moving away from constant combat, and especially in this very male-coded environment it may be difficult for some people to accept that making a choice in a conversation can be as entertaining to some as… shooting stuff is to others.
However, I also know that there is a clear line drawn between visual novels such as Danganronpa and Ace Attorney, and visual novels that focus (or even so much as prominently include) romance and sex — you know, “girl stuff”. Again, games are a male, often cis-male-coded environment, and we’re still in our infancy when it comes to diversity and inclusion in all aspects of the industry and its output. Japanese companies however, have really little issue with tapping into anything people are willing to pay for. Sure, the social stigma may still exist, but if you want it, you got it. There is an aside I have to make about porn that would deserve its own article, which is that when we think of porn or even just sex in games (there is a difference), Western society has gendered porn in really rather dangerous ways — the stuff we present to men, from men, is often non-consensual and highly degrading, and so the porn games you find on top of Steam’s popularity lists sometimes is the kind of stuff that gives any game including any form of erotica a bad reputation. I think, and this is a narrative design concern I would love more designers to acknowledge, that there are differences in what we let players experience and experiment with, which could genuinely help people live out kinks for example, but with the way Western society looks at these topics, as it stands we’ve basically shut the book on the whole conversation.
I will suck this Media Studies lecture back into my body now, digest it and present you with a pithy bit of writing advice instead, which is what people email me for nowadays — we have turned culture into subculture, and if you want to make something meaningful, you have to realise that just because it’s not of widespread focus, that doesn’t mean there is no interest for it. I think the best writer is one who first realises their inhibitions, where those inhibitions come from, and then lets go of them. And I don’t mean your as-of-yet unvoiced sympathies for nazis. Please, no nazis, okay? You keep that shit buried. But sometimes you’ve just got to be honest, and that’s difficult to do while keeping in mind that you are putting that honesty in a commercial product, but the gaming industry as it stands is dishonest in a lot of alarming ways.
So, how does this lead back to Arcadia Fallen, you ask me roughly 600 words later? Well, it’s a Western visual novel by a three-person team (four now, I think?) plus contractors, so three people have contributed to a growing genre, and have made what they, and judging from the Kickstarter at least 700 more people, want to see exist, and LGBTQ+ friendly fantasy visual novel with romance options and voice acting. Whenever I concentrate on this simple fact, I basically turn supernova, because there are so many fandom subcultures people have engaged in to lead to this moment, people just making fanzines and writing fanfiction and then just outright making the stuff they want to see, and I love it. I LOVE IT!!!
But, more importantly, looking at this game, which was made with a small budget, but has an absolutely stellar cast of voice actors and MERCH, I feel the same excitement I’ve expressed over Midnight Suns recently — just seeing other people make the things you want to make. I don’t know if I ever will, I feel I’m too timid to be the kind of person that goes asking for money and who does bizdev. I mean, I kinda do all of these things as a freelancer, but the older I get, the more I wish someone would just tell me what to do for a while — other people develop leadership ambitions, and I lose them.
But Arcadia Fallen had me right there again, pouring over the devlog and the Kickstarter figures, the hours and money invested in VA, and I just WANTED. The great thing about game development, indie game development at least, is that I’ve yet to meet someone who isn’t totally game to talk to you about these things. I don’t know how far this community spirit reaches, but I’ve gone from a journalist to a dev just because the information, if you want it, is there, and it’s so refreshing to have that, instead of the secrecy that permeates so many other parts of the industry. I am really annoyed at myself, because if I had had the courage, I would’ve talked to Arcadia Fallen’s developers at Gamescom, and I was too fricking shy. Instead, yesterday I annoyed people in my DMs until well into the night about Arcadia Fallen and all of the things none of them care about (“being an artist and a writer must be super hard, but let’s be honest, it saves you money” “the more locations you have, the more backdrops you need, that stuff piles up real fast” “people use AI to save on character expressions sometimes, others will just redraw the complete characters with different poses” “29.000 words! I know how long that takes to write without edits now, that stuff just multiplies so fast if you add choices” “VA is so expensive, I talked to Kris and they said — -“) and I’ve realised how happy this makes me. Really genuinely happy. I naturally slip into looking at games like this from every angle I can, and for the first time in my life, this felt like a really hard wink and nudge from life.
I’ve said it before, gamedev makes me extremely happy. I have lucked out on a team that lets me peek at everything and opine on everything and be so goddamn annoying sometimes, and even though there are a lot of things I’m missing because the team is so small and I teach a lot of things by myself, I do already think that just making stuff is just endlessly fascinating. And then you start to think. Since I’ve had this dumb idea for Football Love Story, I’ve only been able to work at it sporadically — turns out my schedule in order to make ends meet really forbids me from investing in anything else, and that’s how Eric Barone-style legends are born — people with savings and partners who take the risk of staying at home to make a thing. But now, the idea is in up in there — sometimes, people just take that risk, and when it doesn’t work out, they go back to their regular jobs. I would like to see what I can make if someone trusted me, even if it was just for a year. I think I’m too early in my gamedev “career” to attempt something like that — right now, the fear of not finding a project after this one is regularly keeping me up at night still, and I at least want to see if a POC can ever feel secure enough in this industry to have sth to return to if their ambitious project doesn’t work out. But really, this whole idea made me feel really blessed — I know people, and they are nice to me from all parts of the industry, and sometimes I think — why shouldn’t I ask for money, prototype, make something? I am here admitting I can’t do it after work, but I’m already in a better position than most. Look, rami Ismail played a video game he liked and became a pilot, I play video games I like and I just want to make more video games.
So, er, yes, play Arcadia Fallen if you have an interest in visual novels, and if you want to learn more about visual novels, there are great places on the internet now, such as Blerdy Otome.