Long eroges

Visual Novel Community Visual Novel Talk
#1

ELF’s ‘kono yo no hate de koi wo utau shoujo YU-NO’, containing 4.56mb of text, was the longest eroge ever written for a huge amount of time - from its release in 1996 until fairly recently.

4.56mb of text is an insane amount of text. It bypasses most novels and even whole series’ of novels by an insane amount. YU-NO managed it with a huge number of different events and a very intricate system. Many report it takes on the order of 50 hours to complete the title. That’s 50 hours of pure reading, essentially.

There are other long eroges. Although nothing came close to YU-NO in its time, somewhat more recent famous titles like Nitroplus’ ‘Hello World’ and TYPE-MOON’s ‘Fate/stay Night’ have come close, at 4.49mb and 4.29mb. Each title is essentially like three eroges in one, in terms of sheer length.

But what’s been happening recently? This year, Akabeisoft2’s ‘W.L.O’ was released with 6.5mb of text. With virtually no fanfare, the record YU-NO held for years was mercilessly shattered.
Furthermore, just in the past few days, PIL’s 'France Shoujo ~Une Fille Blanche~ was released with a text size of 6mb.

If that weren’t enough, an upcoming title by age, ‘Elfen Blaze’, is supposed to have 17.3mb of text. 17.3mb. That’s over 25 times the length of ‘Kana: Little Sister’.

Even normal eroges are getting longer - the upcoming ‘Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai’, by the Tsuyokiss writer is slated to have 3.9mb of text.

Basically, the trend seems to be heading towards longer and longer scripts.

I’m not really complaining or anything - if anything, I think it’s sort of nice, but what do other people think? Do you pine for the days when you could finish an eroge in a week while working full time? Or is the longer they get, the better? Bring on the 20mb, the 40mb, the 100mb, we’ll play them all even if they take months?

#2

I don’t think I would play a 100-hour long game. Keeping the plot and the writing quality on high levels for so much is almost impossible. Besides, I’m sure you can get more out of four 25-hours long stories, than out of one 100-hours long story. Different settings, different characters, different themes, different emotions.

Even games like Fate/stay night should be an exception in my opinion. Anything between 15-30 hours is a good length - enough to develop plot and characters, not enough to make you grow weary of them.

Anyway…17,3 MB? Just how much stuff are they gonna put in that game? :shock:

#3

I think this move is perhaps part of the overall trend towards increased production quality in eroges. As long as the move towards longer scenarios doesn’t result in lower-quality writing or needless padding, then I’m definitely all for it. However, certain scenarios, settings and writing styles are more suited for shorter eroges (generalising, but often these include games taking place over very short periods of time (a week or less) or within very ‘confined’ settings), although now I guess those sorts of eroges will probably become less and less common.

I’d say around 80% of the full-length eroges I’ve played have been exactly the right length for the story, with the remaining 20% being evenly divided between too long and too short. More than anything else, for me it’s the quality of the writing that determines how successful an eroge will be, so often it’s the poorly written games (or scenes within them) that make them ‘too long’. ‘Too short’ would also have to encompass the price factor, but as long as a full-price new release clocks in at being over 1mb, then I won’t be disappointed in that regard.

For game length, Tokihako deserves a mention too as it’s a 2500 yen game (available on hana dlsite), with around 200 base CGs, and a scenario of 3.8mb. I’m not sure how they’ll actually recoup the amount of time + money that’s been put into it, particularly since it’s an otome game. (Edit: Thanks Lancer-X - I’m an idiot for not realising it was an eroge ESPECIALLY when it was clearly stated on the website)

#4

Hmmm… Long does not mean better. Lord of the Rings is a loooooong story. That doesn’t mean I consider it the best fantasy novel I’ve ever read. :slight_smile:

Short stories can be deliciously great - hence legendary authors like Arthur C. Clarke and whatnot. Same deal with eroge in my opinion.

If a story is legendary – its legendary for the story itself. Not how many characters, how long much text, or how many chapters. 8)

#5

I think that there is much more to this than than the text data size indicates. Since time isn’t really an issue for me currently, the factors that determine whether the large size is a bad or good thing are:
[list][]How many routes there are that result in a real ending[/]
[]How many characters there are that have scenarios[/]
[]Whether or not the story makes steady progress[/]
[]What kind of a branching structure the story has[/][/list]
There are probably more factors that I could come up with, but those are the most important ones that come to mind. Of course, all these points are moot if the story isn’t good enough to hold interest.

#6

It’s not actually all-ages - the game has H scenes (although not many, I’ll admit - they’re spread pretty thin for the length of the game!). But otherwise, true, except I do think it was released in packaged form years ago and was only just recently released on dlsite. No clue how well it did back then, though, since it’s a doujin game.

#7

OH man!!! thats insane. I mean even 4 MB is an insanely amount of text. I would enjoy some shorter stuff definately. More than 50+ hrs of gaming on one game !!! I’ll go nuts.

#8

Just for the sake of reference: the complete works of Shakespeare - formatted in notepad - is a “mere” 5 MB.

#9

True! But George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ is also looooooooooooong (and unfinished) and I would probably consider it to be the best fantasy series I’ve ever read =P

#10

I’m surprised no one’s mentioned “War and Peace” or “Les Miserables”.

Speaking of which, I took a look and discovered this amongst the longest novels section of wiki:

#11

Yeah; was discussing that in relation to eroge lengths. 10 million Japanese characters is 20mb of text. Puts Elfen Blaze’s 17.3mb into perspective =p

#12

I do! It’ll just last longer - I don’t need to finish the whole work in one go or anything, and I routinely play multiple eroges at once. This one will just take even longer than the norm.

It’s not on par with those ‘other two games’*, but then again, almost nothing is. Basically, it goes something like:

[AB2’s Looseboy games] > W.L.O > [everything else by AB2]

So yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s not on par with Looseboy’s work, but it’s better than everything non-Looseboy by AB2.

*actually other 3 games, because the A Profile remake is an AB2 title, and it’s by Looseboy. While I haven’t played it, if a game is good a remake of that game is probably going to be good, and it adds an extra route (roughly 50% extra scenario).

#13

How much of all this vaunted text length in eroge is just repeated text? I find it hard to believe that an eroge company would write a story from scratch rivaling the length of one of the longest written works ever.

#14

The text count generally does not include repeated text. Most modern eroges don’t contain repeated text in the script anyway - that would really annoy people that are trying to skip stuff they’ve already read, because the engine wouldn’t know that they’ve already read it that way. Some older titles, on the other hand, contain MOUNTAINS of repeated text and the count needs to be adjusted to remove the duplicates.

#15

Sacrilege! :stuck_out_tongue:

Unlike Narg, there aren’t many short stories I really like, stories that can stand on their own that is. Their are short stories within works that I do like, FE: the Mushi-shi manga has pretty much all its chapters self-containted (the few that aren’t are 2 chapters and occasionally they have a gag with one character coming back).

Size of text does not always mean the eroge is longer though; a number of factors need to be considered. First, the basic structure of the narrative. More sophisticated games may have more text display on a complete game and have less MB of text overall than less complex scripts do the way the engine can grab the appropriate script. IE less sophisticated titles tend to reuse the same script for the same scenes on different routes but call from different areas. This bloats the size of the file and makes it look like there is more text than there actually is compared to a game designed to call text from the same location more often.

Even more modern ones still contain a lot of repeat text when the scenes vary subtly. If a scene needs 1 line of dialogue different, the breakup is made up in most titles by scenes and that entire scene will be repeat text. Very few eroge are coded to call non-repeat text.

Different font can increase the byte-size of each character depending upon what font is used and what characters are. In addition variations in font, such as color, size, placement, special timing, etc also add code that would appear in the text file.

#16

Then the natural question is, how much of this deceptively large length is due to scripting commands being included in the length measurement? There is a huge difference between “Hi, John!” and something like this:

[CHAR eq Nyarlathotep].FACE_EXPR(“Happy”);
[CHAR eq Nyarlathotep].SAY(“Hi, John!”);

#17

Correct, older titles do this like I mentioned, but few modern ones do because users expect ‘skip read text’ to actually skip read text.

Actually, quite a lot are, because that’s what people expect. I’m not saying there’s nothing repeated at all, but usually the number of duplicates are. Furthermore, the numbers I am using consist of duplicate passages being removed.

Er, what? How?

And if you mix up ‘character set’ and ‘font’ I’m going to be annoyed! However, if you did mean ‘character set’ I’m talking converted to SJIS, so it will be constant.

There is none. This is text, not scripting commands. If scripts were measured instead of raw text, some engines which have naturally massively bloated scripts, like NPA, would have much larger sizes. This is explicitly referring to the amount of TEXT, not scripting. Furthermore, the name of the speaker is not included (as some eroges show the name of the speaker in the text, others don’t, and it would lead to misleading results).

#18

Then I disbelieve the illusion. It’s not that I don’t believe you, I just don’t believe it. This does not seem possible. The numbers seem unbelievably large.

Edit: I mean, the Encyclopedia Brittanica (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncyclopÊdia_Britannica#Print_version) comprises roughly 40M words – meaning that it might run (depending on average word length) between 250 and 400 megabytes in size. I find it hard to believe the eroge industry can be so prodigiously productive.

The Wheel of Time series has 3.5 million words in it, for crying out loud! And it’s not an encyclopedia, so the letters-per-word are lower, meaning that’s proably close to 18 or so megs. The series is so long, it was running for the better part of two decades, and Robert Jordan has died. It is to be completed by another author.

If a b-game company was producing a prodigious work, the length of the entire as-yet-unfinished Wheel of Time series, every couple years … I would like to know exactly how large IS the army of staffers they must be employing to produce such an epic? And how can they charge anything less than $250 for it? And if the work is THAT large, how can you expect anyone to ever buy more than one or two?

Taking several months to play through someone’s route seems like a bit much …

(Apparently the Ê in the first link is b0rking the BBS software, so it’s not clicky. Sorry.)

#19

The amount of repeat text has decreased, but there is still a lot. If you have 50 lines of text in a scene and 4 unconnected lines var slightly, it may be easier to simply paste the entire scene rather than risk bugs. This is complied when you have say 5 different characters each with 3 different ways of handling the situation. This becomes quite complex and you may end up breaking things unless your good at coding and proofing your edits and even then you may still.

I’m talking about font, though character set is appropriate as well. Every time you switch font (and there may be reasons such as character stylization for particular characters or certain scenes) that adds code.

Different character sets also have more bytes as well with certain sets having complex kanji taking 3 bytes rather than 2.

In many cases scripts include complete text dumps, which include control characters. Unless someone specifically says it doesn’t include control characters you cannot assume it does not.

#20

These titles are not produced ‘every couple years’ at all. In fact, when it comes to Elfen Blaze, that’s the only work of its kind. Even the smaller large eroges are rare and produced only sporadically. Clannad and Fate/stay Night both took years.

There’s only one writer working on it (Elfen Blaze), for reference.

Yes, code which isn’t counted =p

Didn’t you even read my post? I explicitly stated converted to SJIS. How many bytes large is a kanji in SJIS? 2. Always 2. No exceptions, ever. UTF-8, kanji can use between 3 and 4 bytes (I don’t think anything are in the first two bytes). UTF-16, kanji can use 2 or 4 bytes. But we’re not using those, we’re using SJIS. For reference, eroges do not generally use kanji outside the JIS X 0208 plane, as those would not be available in SJIS anyway =p

Control characters count as scripting - there is actually a fairly well-known standard for determining the text length of an eroge, and it does NOT include names, formatting codes, scripting or anything of the sort. It DOES, however, include ruby. Is this significant? Maybe. Not in most eroges, but France Shoujo ~Une Fille Blanche~ does contain a LOT of ruby. It would still probably be the second longest eroge even if it had none of that, but still.