Genres
Visual novel
A video game genre of Japanese origin focused on presenting a story through text, static art and sound, often with choices that branch the narrative.
A visual novel is a video game genre of Japanese origin focused on presenting a story: the player advances through prose (in Japan the genre is often called noberugemu, "novel game") over static character art and backgrounds, with music and sound effects. Many titles offer choices that branch the narrative, with ending counts ranging from six in some works to 85 in others, but branching is not a requirement: a 2021 study found roughly 18 percent of visual novels are fully linear "kinetic novels". The genre dominates Japanese PC gaming, with around 500 releases a year, and Western readers usually meet it through anime adaptations of series such as Clannad and Higurashi.
For novel and web-serial writers it is the sibling format of the light novel: text-forward, cheap to produce, feeding the same adaptation pipeline, and a working proof that one manuscript can support branching paths to many endings. See how to write a light novel.