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On Monday, a staff of fan translators celebrated the beginning of the visible novel with an English patch for 1996’s Japanese PC-98 recreation Shizuku. Within the mid-90s, just lately established improvement studio Leaf—which at that time had solely made a strip mahjong recreation and an grownup JRPG—launched a “Visible Novel Sequence” of three grownup video games, starting with Shizuku. Leaf’s fashion of journey recreation would quickly develop into a phenomenon.
It feels a bit shakier to say that Leaf invented the visible novel, even when the studio coined the time period. As talked about intimately within the video from YouTuber Bowl of Lentils above, Shizuku was closely impressed by developer Chunsoft’s “sound novels” for the Tremendous Nintendo like Otogirisō, which have been mainly, effectively, easy visible novels. Chunsoft’s journey video games positioned textual content over static backgrounds and allow you to make selections at key narrative moments, very similar to different journey video games relationship again to the Eighties. Audio was there to assist heighten the storytelling regardless of the restricted graphics.
Leaf’s huge “innovation” was to focus extra on depicting its characters on-screen, which is smart contemplating it was an erotic recreation. Shizuku was additionally predated by groundbreaking (and wildly in style) relationship sim Tokimeki Memorial, which emphasised its graphics to related impact. However “visible novel” was such a catchy title, it caught with us for 30 years to develop into the de facto phrase to explain just about any journey recreation that prioritizes textual content over interactivity.
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Shizuku was solely a modest success, however the third recreation within the Visible Novel Sequence, To Coronary heart, hit huge, making Leaf a serious participant in grownup journey video games within the years to come back. A remake of To Coronary heart landed on Steam final 12 months with an English translation and no grownup scenes.
Leaf’s mother or father firm Aquaplus, which publishes non-adult-themed video games, remains to be going robust, and today is finest recognized for the Utawarerumono beat ’em up collection. The latest simply landed on Steam in December 2025.
I performed two hours of the brand new Shizuku translation final evening. Whereas I am not the largest fan of the font, the script itself reads very effectively. I undoubtedly would not advocate Shizuku to most individuals (it is very NSFW) nevertheless it’s actually fascinating to lastly play this traditionally vital VN in English.
— @bowloflentils.bsky.social (@bowloflentils.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-28T00:55:33.349Z
Shizuku possible is not of a lot curiosity to truly play in the present day except you are fascinated with the historical past of visible novels. But when that is you, you’ll find a replica on the Web Archive and get it working, with the English patch utilized, within the PC-98 emulator Neko Venture 21/W.
