Why the only things I will read are visual novel games

Since I started high school, I’ve occasionally skimmed through texts the night before an exam, but it’s not like I’m actually taking in the meaning of most of the words. I got through high school with the help of SparkNotes (although I’ll never forgive them for the two-sentence summary they wrote for Brokeback Mountain — only got one question right on that pop quiz). I would even go as far as to dedicate my high school diploma to SparkNotes.

Nowadays, when I actually try to read, it just takes me too long to really understand what’s going on. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fantasy novel or a scientific article; I get frustrated by the seemingly endless text and stop trying. I even surprise myself when I recall the fact that I was an extremely avid reader in my childhood; I used to max out the amount of books I borrowed at the library all the time.

The closest thing to books that I’ve read since finishing The Picture of Dorian Gray are story-oriented games. Lots of these games are part of a genre called visual novels; They’re considered games, but you spend most of your time reading through descriptions and character dialogue. Usually, you’ll have scenery or character portraits to accompany what text is on the screen. Sometimes I skip through description, but for the most part, I can actually get through a visual novel without getting frustrated with the amount of text (and some of these games can have a word count similar to that of a Tolkien novel).

The format of a visual novel is more digestible to me than any old-fashioned book. A visual novel is basically like watching a very dialogue-heavy movie with subtitles turned on and, of course, user interactions which allow you to go through the screens of text at your own pace. Some visual novels also include more gameplay like letting you move around or make story-changing decisions to freshen things up a little.

One visual novel game series I managed to play through without thinking twice about all the reading involved was Danganronpa. So far, only two of the main games have come out in the U.S., but there’s a third (and most likely final) one coming out later in the year that I’m definitely looking forward to.

Each Danganronpa game’s premise is similar to that of The Hunger Games. A bunch of teenagers are trapped together and can only escape by killing each other. While I enjoyed Suzanne Collins’ first book, I couldn’t get through the later ones as easily. I never managed to read the entirety of Mockingjay; I skipped to the end. But I loved that I could essentially experience the same story all over again without the pain of reading paragraphs and paragraphs without any visuals.

The Danganronpa games also gave me plenty of opportunity to look around and talk to characters, making it more immersive than just reading The Hunger Games. I envy the people who can lose themselves in a traditional book and actually imagine what’s going on all the time. While I might have been able to do that as a kid (which would explain how I actually liked reading then), I’m definitely not able to anymore. But that’s okay. After all, there are still hundreds of visual novels I want to read out there.