I never heard of that page before, but I found even the most obscure Japan-only VN I know* there, so looks good from my perspective. I tried a few non-VN games too and found all of them.
My only nitpick: Some of them were missing “time to beat”, which e.g. https://vndb.org had. (I’m definitely not suggesting to use VNDB as the primary source though - they only have VNs, and even there their definition of VN is overly strict.)
*) Which is the Fuuraiki series. I don’t know a lot of VNs, so take that info with a grain of salt.
Ah, and maybe it’s clear, but I forgot to mention why “time to beat” is important to me: Right now, being new to VNs in Japanese, I mostly play short ones because I don’t want to be occupied for half a year or more. Additionally, while those times are of course different for a learner like me, I found that multiplying the number with 3 for the easier VNs (~L20-25) turns out to be pretty accurate in my case.
I went and checked my comiket haul against it and it actually had 3 of the 4 doujin VNs from this past year’s comikets that I checked. That was definitely better than I was expecting so I agree it’s promising
The only info missing here that I really wish it had was the author. I get why on a game focused site it’s not right there on the page, but this is one sense in which I browse VNs more like books vs games where I would be looking probably more at the company. At the end of the day though I don’t need Natively to be a VNDB replacement to be happy so this isn’t that big of a deal to me
The only thing is that I really would like to have at least the option to track these by pages instead of time (maybe something you can add optionally like how you can add time to your book logs?). I really just don’t keep track of time for VNs, I only track how many pages of text they were
Yeah, hooking them generally (so technically I’m tracking characters but I do also track this as pages by just dividing by 400 - about right for a bunkobon page)
I do sometimes also use a physical counter (like one of those little metal ones you click with your thumb) to eyeball it by counting lines
Also pull the scripts from the game, although this one I realize is way beyond what most people would do (but this is where a good percentage of the character counts on JPDB come from)
Thanks! When I hook something I just log as character count. Not that I do it often.
With ebooks I also log characters instead of pages… but it makes sense to convert everything to one or the other for easier comparison.
Another note on that: While people might not be interested in tracking their session time, they might want to track their total time spent in the end. Total time spent is automatically measured by e.g. Steam, Switch or when using a texthooker, so it’s readily available in many cases.
I’m not sure how useful it would be to display aggregates of that to others on the game pages, because it would wildly fluctuate by both Japanese knowledge level and playstyle, but in the end it could just go to the personal statistics page: Played X hours of games.
@brandon it would be nice to note what language you played the game in; would that be possible? So for something like Pokemon I could record that I’ve played the same game in both Japanese and Spanish.
I’d assume you would you just add the game in your Japanese section and your Spanish section, just like you’d do with e.g. books right now.
(Except games are mostly multi-lingual instead of having multiple editions, I guess - so maybe they’d be available for multiple languages instead of separate editions like e.g. books currently have.)
The names aren’t great for language learning, granted, but I’ve always enjoyed the games as an easy confidence-builder for playing a game in a foreign language. The earliest ones I’ve played to death in English, and a lot of the text is going to be repetitive, so it’s a winning combination in my book.
So more questions for you all, as I continue to poke around.
Is there any notion of ‘editions’ in video games or, more importantly, visual novels? When things are rereleased on new platforms, are they usually the same? For example, this VN series seems to have ‘editions’ of essentially the same story. Example: 1, 2
If those are editions, it seems like IGDB doesn’t collapse them into one listing… so that series actually has many fewer unique games than the 17 that they list
For items which are not editions, I’m assuming games & VNs are significant enough that grading each game separately makes sense (rather than locking the grading of the entire series). Or should we lock the rating?
It looks like some items have ‘episodes’ within the visual novel. I wasn’t planning on doing subdivisions of visual novels or games. That’s alright, correct?
@Bijak you mentioned the lack of an author on IGDB. Do you have an example? The VNs i’ve looked at on both VNDB & IGDB so far have both not had authors.
I must say, I did not think there would be ‘editions’ for video games, so I’m slightly disappointed. Let me know your thoughts on how common / if those items I mentioned are true rereleases with the same content.
For VNs: usually, but not always. Relatively frequently you will see extra content on the console release like a new route or the game being combined with sequels/fan disks
This gets both scenarios at once: The Vita edition has extra after stories that the main game didn’t and the Switch version additionally rolled in the fan disk entirely
Yeah sorry I made the term more generic there but it will be listed under “scenario” in VNDB. Could be one for the whole game, or sometimes on very large games one lead and then separate writers for each of the routes. I imagine that if it’s listed on IGDB it’d be under “Writer” or a term like that but I didn’t see a staff section at all. I may be more writer focused overall than average though - not sure if anyone else even cares about this (and not a huge deal to me anyway other than that it would be neat to see stats on it)
Personally I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other about this but I think typically these “episodes” are labeled that way because they are released separately (sometimes months or years apart). For ones that are finished it probably doesn’t matter, but for ongoing it might be awkward
Haha - I was wondering if the example would be Famicom Detective Club, and sure enough it was
In this case, while the story might be the same, graphics and quality of life features are not as far as I know. So while somebody might think the old version is dated and wouldn’t want to play it, the new version might be different to them - or vice versa, if they are a retro fan.
So… keeping them as separate entries (maybe keeping relationship info, like “remake of” if that’s possible) sounds like the way to go here.
If it’s literally the same game released for different platforms however, keeping it as one entry would be preferable I think.
So in general I think how IGDB seems to be doing it seems to be a good way.
The developer (which is listed in IGDB) would probably be a much more universally applicable (to both games and VNs) “author” type label for stats breakdowns if you wanted to pull anything over - but I don’t think either is necessary (no director or studio breakdown doesn’t stop people from using the anime tracking)
So, they may vary a little or a lot. And the game play usually is somewhat different (at least, different like 2 madden games might be different… same ‘plot’ but different graphics, QoL features and ultimately gameplay).
It seems then that each of these releases should be treated as if they were a volume in a series. It also seems like we should probably lock the rating, as the content is quite similar and thus the language difficulty is similar.
However, there could be series like Assassin’s Creed which varies in difficulty and we should grade each release separately… but that’s ok.
That seems right?
Edit: Reviews are a little awkward, since I imagine they would be spread out over the volumes much more than books are. We may have to implement ‘series’ reviews or at least a better series page which surfaces reviews.
