Add Visual Novels & Video Games

[Legato]

@brandon

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.

For what it’s worth, I think:

• Most of the time, it might be easier to treat releases as part of a family of games (without implying any kind of sequence) and have relationship information like prequel/sequel/remake/etc. if it applies.
• Adding rating locking to any part of this adds more complications than it is worth, and every game page should just be rated on its own. What if content matter is different? What if furigana, voice over, a switch shortcut between EN/JP or a log function was added?

[brandon]

@Legato

Most of the time, it might be easier to treat releases as part of a family of games (without implying any kind of sequence) and have relationship information like prequel/sequel/remake/etc. if it applies.

I think I agree that’d be ideal… have it be a ‘collection’ or ‘family’ rather than a 'series. Unfortunately though, we only really have series right now to indicate connections. I think it’d be best to use series for the time being.

@Legato

Adding rating locking to any part of this adds more complications than it is worth, and every game page should just be rated on its own. What if content matter is different? What if furigana, voice over, a switch shortcut between EN/JP or a log function was added?

Hmm, I guess I’m somewhat wary that we’d get enough gradings per game. I’m assuming most VNs and video games will have many items in these families and I’d assume that people will somewhat randomly distribute over them?

I do agree that it could be noisy, but it very well could be similar to books, where the ‘noise’ in the ratings is well worth the tradeoff of having more gradings.

We could of course start out with individual gradings, see how it goes and then switch to some locking if we like? Maybe that’s the best course of action.

[Legato]

@brandon

We could of course start out with individual gradings, see how it goes and then switch to some locking if we like? Maybe that’s the best course of action.

I think that might be the way, yeah.

[eefara]

@brandon

It seems then that each of these releases should be treated as if they were a volume in a series.

This feels like it’s going to get messy quickly when you have a series of games were each individual game has gone through multiple re-releases; see Kingdom Hearts, Pokemon, or Metal Gear Solid. The content in all of those is going to vary based on which release of the game it is, too, so you can’t really collapse then into one item for every entry in the series.

[araigoshi]

@brandon

Is there any notion of ‘editions’ in video games or, more importantly, visual novels?

Yes. Higurashi for example has significant differences in content across releases on different consoles and PC and even between the original and modern PC releases.

Newer re-releases of other games (especially common on 3DS → Switch ports, for example) may also add features that affect the difficulty for a language learner meaningfully, such as more audio clips, furigana, logs, pausable cutscenes etc.

@brandon

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?

Going back to Higurashi as an example, each episode is so long, that at least personally I’d want to be able to mark them off as completed as I go were I to attempt it in Japanese.

[eefara]

@araigoshi

Going back to Higurashi as an example, each episode is so long, that at least personally I’d want to be able to mark them off as completed as I go were I to attempt it in Japanese.

In the case of Higurashi at least, I believe those episodes are actually sold as individual units anyway, so it would make sense to break those down into their own Natively entries.

[brandon]

@eefara

In the case of Higurashi at least, I believe those episodes are actually sold as individual units anyway, so it would make sense to break those down into their own Natively entries.

It seems to be one massive series with all the chapters separate on IGDB, like you’re describing.

So under the current proposal, yes, they’d all get separate Natively entries in that series, but with different difficulty ratings.

[brandon]

FYI - this feature is now in progress! We will be doing IGDB only to start off. I’ve had some chats with people and I know they’ve had issues with some VNs not being on there, but it makes sense to start there and then add VNDB afterwards.

See here - Big Picture - Natively Upcoming Features (2023-2024) - #59 by brandon

[Legato]

Just pressing the button is not enough for that, so:

I’ve been wanting a Natively for video games for a loooooong time

[eagleflo]

Just wanted to add my voice in support for this request. I’d really like to rate & preview ratings for games as well as books & manga. It’s an excellent way to learn the language.

While we have all sorts of tier lists and good YouTube channels for recommendations, they really don’t rank the contents – the rating is based on stuff like whether there is push to continue and furigana. While that’s helpful, having even a vague level of the Japanese required to play the game would be so much more helpful. 真・女神転生IV has both furigana and push to continue, but I would not recommend it to a beginner.

IGDB is a good starting point IMHO. It lacks some covers, but those also do get approved eventually… just that there are very few admins left after Amazon laid off the Twitch folks working on it.

(https://backloggd.com/ is a very cool site for games specifically built on top of IGDB, but it’s most definitely not aimed at language learners in any way, and even tracking English and Japanese versions separately isn’t supported. Perhaps it could still provide inspiration.)

I’ve been trying to find something for this use for ages, but I can’t find anything. Here on Natively we already have the scale and enough of a community to bootstrap the ratings. Natively is in the unique posture to make it happen, I think.

On the finance side, apart from https://amazon.co.jp/ there is https://www.play-asia.com/en/ which has something like this: https://www.play-asia.com/en/info/PartnerProgram. I’ve used them for new imports, although I must admit that I mostly buy used & retro from 駿河屋.

Selecting the next game right now, that’s why this popped into mind once again.