[selkirk]

Originally Posted by musashiken

Call me anal if you want, but tell me again, where did you get the idea that Visual Novels should be the main genre? Shouldn't we just stick to "Erogames"? I mean, we were talking about Adult games right?

That's the whole point. We're not only talking specifically about Erogames. "Visual Novel" would just be a term to indicate all types of games where you get a story in text form, and you make choices to choose the path the story moves along.
One of the problems with just using the term "Erogame", is that there's a huge variety of games, with vastly different gameplay, which could all be grouped as such. Would you really consider Kanon, Schoolmate, and let's say, some strip Mahjong game the same thing? All three could be considered as an "Erogame", but few people would really consider them to be the same type of game.

Originally Posted by musashiken

How do we know what is the original genre as termed by the Japanese? Especially when some of you don't know Japanese and when you see several English sites using the term Visual Novels and you start to think that that's the right general term for all erotic games?

To be honest, I admit that I don't really know. But the reason why I started this was because someone mentioned something about a Non-adult game (Symphonic Rain) in a thread specifically for Ero-games and termed it as a Visual Novel among a group of both Adult and Non-adult games. I mean, that's just plain confusing right? Normally I wouldn't give a damn, but I decided to post something to see what happens and viola, this happens.

Granted, good call for pointing out a Non-adult game in a thread which should be talking about Erogames. However, no one's saying that "Visual Novel" should be used for all erotic games. Far from it in fact. Furthermore, that's not the only case where people talked about games with no erotic content in that thread, and hence why a better term than "Erogame" is needed. Unless you say that the definition should be strictly adhered to, and a new thread created for, oh dang, we don't really have a term to use, do we? What, "What Non-Ero-games are your favorites at the moment?" I highly doubt that would stay on the topic of, for lack of a better term, ADV games for long.

Originally Posted by musashiken

Well so I decided to do a little research on the Japanese wiki and I found this.

And it just makes things more confusing.

But what I did gather is that the term Adventure game is the main genre of all the games we discussed. But its' abbreviation ADV is normally used to term many Gal Games and Boys' Love games. Which doesn't help at all.

And why wouldn't it help? It's not like various Galge and BL games aren't "Adventure" games. They are, it's just a very open description, and quite unlike what many people seem to think of as an "ADV" game. Still, that doesn't mean it's not a correct term. Kinda like how Chess, 4X games, TBS, RTS, etc, can all be called "Strategy" games.

Originally Posted by musashiken

So where does "Visual novel" come into my argument? Like I said, I wanted to clarify it because I feel strongly that "Visual novel" shouldn't be used to generalize all games (both non and adult) like what this guy was suggesting. I'm not blaming him or anything, after all he got his sources from some other guy.

I'm no expert on what p977tt was thinking, but those games do share certain characteristics, just not whether or not they have erotic elements. They all tell a story through text, similar to what I among others would likely group under the term "Visual Novel". Whether or not it's adult isn't really the point here, imho.

Originally Posted by musashiken

For me, Japanese games were always Erogames or non Erogames (why go into the technicality of whether "Ero" is rightfully a "genre" or "description"?). Visual Novels are the ones with text all over the background and it was immortalized when Leaf started using it for their games. ADV games are the ones with the dialogue boxes in the bottom half of the screen ala Da Capo, Shuffle etc. Come on, almost all Erogames I played had text only in this 2 forms.

And by coincidence, all the Erogames you've played have been, in my opinion, Visual Novels. How about a strip mahjong game? How about an erotic simulator with no story? As for "ADV" being specifically and only for "ones with the dialogue boxes in the bottom half of the screen", as you yourself mentioned, that's not the case, even for the Japanese.

Does where the text appear really make enough of a difference to merit different genre labels?

Originally Posted by musashiken

You can agree with me or not, but the best way to be sure is to go the the official game sites and look at the genres the companies give their products. You can't beat that. Sure there are more and more weird genres but so far the common "Above 18" games I bothered to check are ADV, AVG, Visual Novel, SLG, SRPG.

The thing is, oftentimes the genre labels the company give don't help, like the example given earlier (Gun Action RPG). Nor do the similar-but-not-quite terms that are never defined help, such as "Interactive Novel".