Mirage_GSM wrote:You'd be surprised. Pulling a game script for Final Fantasy 6, the word count falls at a little over 20k words. Yes, that means Katawa Shoujo has roughly the same number of words as 25 Final Fantasy VIs. In fact, the character count clocks somewhere in the neighborhood of 140k characters. That means that KS has more than three words per character as compared to FF6.
While I agree with you in general, FF VI is probably a bad example. Back then gaming systems were severely restricted by stuff like small textboxes, so they had to cut text length wherever possible.
Point taken. Perhaps taken too much. You got me to look up the scripts for the other SNES and beyond Final Fantasy games, just for comparison. The results are somewhat fascinating.
As a word of warning, these word counts are for the entire script file, which includes intro notes, closing notes, and direction notes, so much more than just the text. And these are different transcribers, so some were more verbose in describing actions and cutscenes. FFIV and FFV are pulled from the Game Boy Advance Translations, because there wasn't an official FFV translation for SNES and the FFIV official translation for the SNES was atrocious:
Final Fantasy IV - 24k words
Final Fantasy V - 32k words
Final Fantasy VII - 125k words
Final Fantasy VIII - 27k words
Final Fantasy IX - 156k words
Final Fantasy X - 111k words
Final Fantasy XII - 43k words
(There was no convenient transcript for FF13)
Interestingly enough, the first fully-voiced game (FFX) was also one of the most verbose. Still, nothing anywhere near the length of the KS Script.
As for my opinion toward game vs visual novel, my opinion is a solid "Who cares?" From a practical standpoint, they're both electronic entertainment and draw from the same pool of your time.
From a pure categorization standpoint, I'd say the pure game lies on one end of the spectrum, and the pure visual novel lies on the other end. The pure game is probably most clearly illustrated in the form of a puzzle game, where there's no actual story, just gameplay. The pure visual novel would be like a regular novel - no decision points or mini-games, just a linear a-to-b story. The visual comes in the multimedia presentation (even though the auditory element isn't part of the name). Games like Double Dragon and Contra are heavily on the game end of the spectrum, but have trace elements of visual novel in that they actually convey a narrative. Similarly, KS is largely in the visual novel end of the spectrum, but the presence of choices provides a level of interactivity, and thus game. And if you were to categorize the game elements of KS, they would fall into Adventure/Puzzle (choices direct the flow of the narrative, with clear right/wrong results).
Ergo, if you REALLY had to categorize KS as a computer game, it would fall into the adventure/puzzle genre.
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