Shizuku is the first Visual Novel

Amelie Doree is a great YouTuber who's videos I highly recommend to everyone seeking to learn more about obscure Japanese Video Games from the 90s and 2000s.  I want to make that clear up front given how this post is about my disagreement with on specific thing she says in her video on Shizuku.  

Now the part about it not being the first Dempa seems to be true, Dempa I don't know much about but it seems like she's correct there.  However I am very invested in properly understanding the history of Visual Novels and other similar kinds of Games.

Her reasons why it's not the first Visual Novel are all very technical, I'd dare say even semantical.  One of my prior posts on Visual Novels takes the position that the mechanical distinction between them and other Games I feel are wrongly called Visual Novels is the dialogue choices being the only interactive element, and I learned from this YT video at least one prior game fits that definition.  But there's a lot about my older posts on Visual Novels I have come to regret since the fall 2023 Anime season.

Let's compare this to the debate about if the Slasher genre began with Halloween.  By every technical standard there are plenty of pre-Halloween films that fit the bill.  However what makes Halloween so vital is the fact that once people were making movies with the premediated concept of a Slasher being the genre they are making, Halloween and it's first sequel were the primary model they were using.

With Visual Novels it's similar, once we're in the time period when Visual Novels undisputedly exist, Leaf's spiritual trilogy not any prior games that technically fit the definition were the inspiration, the first two which are more Horroeqsque are very directly the inspiration for games like Tsukihime when you compare what Tsukihime originally looked like to what they look like.  And then To Heart is clearly the inspiration for One and Key's Seasons Trilogy and Rumbling Hearts and Shuffle.  Then over time those games became more directly influential then what influenced them.

However the difference between the Slasher situation and the Visual Novel situation, at least in the way I chose to describe the Slasher situation, is that no one was making Tsukihime or Kanon thinking of "Visual Novel" as the name of the Genre they are working in.  Because in Japan "Visual Novel" has never bene a genre name, it's only the Leaf series that are called that and it was part of their Branding not a subjective flexible Genre label.  So in that context it's even more indisputable, to the nation that makes all these Games we're talking about there are only 4 Visual Novels and Shizuku is unambiguously the first.

Bowel of Lentils videos on the history of Visual Novels and how that became a term more commonly used in the west then in Japan I highly recommend, and another prior post I made on VNs I kind of regret is the one disagreeing with them.  I have mostly abandoned my past refusal to classify Visual Novels as video games.  Though I still think something more specific then Adventure Game is needed to be the umbrella term for both the undisputed Visual Novels and Dating Sims and other games with this Style.

And that's why I'm indebted to the 2023 Anime 16bit Sensation: Another Layer.  That show has helped make me and others in the Western Fandom aware of how the Japanese term for these kinds of Games is Bishojo Game.

Visual Novel though is still a more distinct subcategory within that.