Completely understand, but I don't think categorizing this as a VN is fully negative, I think it's also an effort to get more people into other VNs by saying this is similar. Like it's the meet halfway "if you can get into AA you can probably get into other VNs", even if it's not necessarily true.

Also the movie is so fucking good

we get so weird about this shit in the west that whether or not disco elysium was a vn was a point of contention for a while

@tatsky i mean i basically know what people mean by it sometimes, and im not saying the west should literally adopt AVG/ADV and NVL to make the ~proper~ distinction, but for me its less that its clearly negative in connotation and more that vn becomes this catch-all to lump anything with a lot of text and maybe character sprites into. i can see how someone would recommend something danganronpa if someone likes ace attorney, but to me recommending things like when they cry or stuff by type moon bc they are all vns is wayyyy more of a stretch. cant help but feel like its "if you like japanese game with words youll like this other japanese game with words" in so many instances

@kingbancho YEAH THATS EVEN WORSE, this idea bleeding into more western-styled games that make you read and dont have a combat system. it comes off like a set of pre-made values to prescribe to games more than giving any weight to what influenced them

Yeah fair. It's annoying and yeah they're not THAT similar to be honest. It's a ridiculous catch-all.
Another spin of this, VN fans while trying to rec their games to others use AA as the closest thing to compare it to because it's really damn popular.

yeah, like how something like obra dinn or outer wilds have formed this not-fully-thought-out idea of a "detective game" that would draw comparisons to a wide array of japanese adventure games that have you play as a detective, despite the huge difference in what they're going for

you may wanna know that there's another case with sort of a standalone plotline after the christmas one (it was added in the ds release and is in all the subsequent ones i think?)

oh if you mean the fifth case i assumed that was like, part 2 of the fourth this whole time? thanks for letting me know !!

The attitudes of people in the west vs people in Japan on what constitutes a VN is really funny. Western VN fans primarily use VNDB to catalogue games, and people are generally unhappy with mods, since they're pretty strict with what gets allowed onto the site, even if said game is adjacent to the community, only has VN fans playing it etc.

There was a controversy a few months ago when 13 Sentinels got taken off, getting people to raise all sorts of questions, wondering why the Persona 4 spinoffs are allowed on the site, etc. They demanded to know the specific reason for 13 Sentinels being removed and it wasn't because of the whole weird RTS game mode in there, it was because you had to move a character and interact with things in between dialogue. Danganronpa was considered to have its dialogue go on uninterrupted long enough (and had narration) so it was allowed, as for Ace Attorney... one of the mods said none of them actually think that AA is a VN, but no-one wants to delete it lest they cause a shitstorm. In contrast, EroGameScape (the Japanese equivalent) has all the Touhou games on there and its userbase seem completely fine with that.

(For that specific example I don't think When they Cry is much of a stretch, at least Umineko. I can't think of many other games I've played where you have murder mysteries with characters arguing about contradictions with over-the-top music playing for a significant chunk. Definitely besides the point tho, I agree that a lot of those kinds of recommendations end up being superficial because it gets treated more like a genre than a medium)

tbh i do see 13 sentinels as more adventure gamey than its made out to be, moving a character through spaces and interacting with people/things in relation to those spaces, even with a contextually flexible "use" function, shapes a player's experience in a specific way and has design intention to consider past what usually comes to mind w vns (not to say vns w any interactivity dont have narrative design). ties into how often the game gets talked about just as "the no gameplay narrative half and the gameplay rts half" for me, which flattens aspects of both in ways i personally don't like. but maybe this is more an issue of me wanting narrative design to be taken more seriously than the game being or not being interpreted as a vn really. and this being said i do think the vndb mods should've been consistent and just added it lol.

i am actually reading umineko slowly rn and i'm not super far in, so i truthfully don't have the best grasp of how it could be compared with aa on that kind of level, but i MIGHT have an idea of what you mean

It is pretty adventure gamey for sure and I think you raise some good points wrt the visual novel classification not really doing that justice. I think RPGs have a similarly blurry line too whenever they're not focused on combat, and they're including puzzles a lot of dialogue, etc. I do think the closest community of people that would appreciate a game like 13S would be the VN one though, so I'm okay with letting them claim it lol. I think there's a public perception of adventure games either being like 90s point-and-click LucasArts stuff or Telltale and that's basically it. Meanwhile similar to what you said before, VNs end up being "Japanese game with words", which 13S still ends up falling under

Also wrt Umineko yea fair enough, I'll refrain from commenting any more on that lol

TBH it also feels weird to me that people don't seem to consider that, to use Ace Attorney just as an example, people don't consider much a game could just be multi-genre. For example, Adventure + Visual Novel. (Which is how I personally imagine it)