What I think is good? For visual novels, I've said this before but there are two good ones: Narcissu and True Remembrance. Then there are plenty of okay and decent ones and a whole lot of bad ones. Sturgeon's law. A perfect visual novel is like a perfect anything, can't be described by anything else then "perfect". Visual novels and most works of art are so complex that there is and never will be one. Things approximating perfection are more easily found in minimalistic, simple things, so maybe a haiku-sized visual novel could potentially be it?LordDarknus wrote:This made me curious, what do you think is actually good then? What was/is your idea of a perfect VN?
In fact, what is your unbiased criteria for defining something/anything as; 'Suck' ; 'Does not suck' ; and 'Perfection'?
As for judging things, it's not just a linear spectrum from "terrible" to "good". There are two aspects: 1) Whether I like it or not (which is intangible and often hard to explain why) and 2) whether I think it's competently done or not (which is the more easily analyzable part). I've liked some really trashy crap and hated some incredibly well done works of art. That sentence already belies that the latter aspect is the traditional "good vs bad" axis. I think the criteria for defining something as good or bad is how it compares to other works we have experienced and how we have analyzed them. The more you read or watch or listen and the more thought you put into it, the better your understanding becomes and along with that the qualifications shift. I think my bar for "good" is pretty high, maybe unnecessarily so, but I really can't say something is good if it doesn't titillate the creative spirit in me and make me think something like "wow, so you can do stuff like THIS too!". I want to be awestruck by the imagination of someone else, and their skill at translating it to their medium.
