Analysis: Your Most Disliked Things in Visual Novels

I opened the post “What is the biggest thing that can make you dislike a visual novel?” yesterday and received hundreds of comments. First of all, thank you. I was going to write this as a reply to the post, but I guess Reddit doesn't allow replies over a certain length. So I wanted to share my analysis here:

I read all the comments and took a lot of notes. I made a general analysis of all the answers. There are most complaints about the characters and story (as expected).

  • Characters and MC: 10
  • Poor Writing and Story: 10
  • Tempo, Pacing and Presentation: 7
  • Choices and Routes: 5
  • Meta Humor and Breaking the 4th Wall: 3
  • Technical and User Experience : 7
  • Erotic Content and Fan Service: 4

For those who are curious, we can summarize all these complaints in a simple way as follows:

1. Poor Writing and Story

  • Logic errors and illogical progression of events.
  • Forced drama, exaggeration of problems that can be solved with a simple conversation.
  • Information dump, unnecessarily long narratives.
  • Elephant scenes, long dialogues that do not contribute to the story.
  • Excessively slow story progression, poor pacing.
  • Forced plot twists, surprises without foreshadowing.
  • Philosophical babbling, long monologues of thought that do not contribute to the story.
  • Unnecessary or poorly written comedy scenes.
  • Overuse of clichés such as the classic school festival, vacation on the beach, obligatory bathroom scene.
  • Narrative styles that prevent the player from connecting with the MC.

2. Characters and MC (Main Character)

  • Characters exhibit illogical behavior.
  • Empty, impersonal, non-customizable main characters (self-insert MC).
  • Overly naive, incompetent or stupid main characters.
  • All women instantly fall in love with an evil or shallow main character.
  • MCs with no story of their own, who exist only to be put in the player's shoes.
  • The player is given a choice, but the character doesn't change or reacts the same in every situation.
  • Male MCs constantly being perverts, making reckless jokes that make female characters uncomfortable.
  • The main character never appears in CGs (special illustration scenes).
  • Constant whining by allegedly "realistic" characters.
  • Side characters only exist to support the main character, they don't have their own stories.

3. Choices and Routes

  • Choices made by the player have little impact on the story.
  • Unclear or misleading choices (e.g. "Yes" or "No", but the outcome is impossible to predict).
  • A small dialog option changes the ending of the game, but there is no logical explanation for this.
  • Repetition of the same story elements in every route, with no new content.
  • Unnecessarily forced choices to advance the main story.

4. Pacing and Presentation

  • The common route is too long.
  • After 40 minutes of reading, a pointless mini-game suddenly appears.
  • Unnecessary scenes during the story, especially overly detailed recipes.
  • Very small fonts, hard to read text.
  • Music is monotonous, ineffective or doesn't fit the story.
  • Bad visuals or VN looks amateurish with no budget.
  • Important events are not supported by CGs, or are glossed over with empty scenes.

5. Meta Humor and Fourth Breaking the Wall

  • Constant "this is because it's a VN" jokes.
  • Western VNs constantly belittling or mocking VN media.
  • Too much irony and sarcasm, making it difficult to take the story seriously.

6. Technical and User Experience

  • Inability to follow the chosen paths (it is not clear which route is being played).
  • No option to quickly skip through previously seen dialogs.
  • No possibility to go back and choose a different path after choices.
  • Lack of voice acting or bad voice acting (which can sometimes spoil even a good VN).
  • Western VNs are generally less elaborate than Japanese VNs.
  • The scale of the project being too big for the authors, leaving everything unfinished.
  • VNs made by developers who don't know their genre well.

7. Erotic Content and Fan Service

  • Forced sexual scenes that do not add anything to the story.
  • Excessive fanservice that detracts from the story.
  • Forced love affairs even in VNs that are not romance-oriented.
  • Poor and disturbing handling of sexuality even without explicit scenes.

I hope this analysis will be useful to someone. I will pay attention to these when I make my own game. Thanks to everyone who participated.