Would you call Phoenix Wright a point-and-click adventure game?
Two of my friends were having a heated argument over this the other day, and I didn't know who to agree with. What do you guys think?
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The new Edgeworth game definitely is:
I'd just call the Phoenix Wright series a "graphical text adventure" series myself, but the distinction is fairly meaningless. It is very much in the spirit of point-and-click adventures.
I was kind of joking, but I feel like "text adventure" is relevant when discussing Phoenix Wright just because there is so little action in the graphics. There are backgrounds, and there are animations of people talking, but mostly there's a crapload of text-based narration to inform you when actions actually occur. It's as much like an "illustrated text adventure" as any modern game could be.
More relevantly, it's true of Deja Vu and Shadowgate two American games that are generally regarded as a big influence on Japanese adventures (which themselves started out as basically graphical interactive fiction with menus instead of parsers). It is. And we call those "Graphic adventures." Just as a novel done entirely with pictures is called a "graphic novel." It's just what that word means.
But I'm pretty sure it's classed as an interactive novel, like clannad and all those japanese dating sims. I think it's one of the only interactive novel games to be officially translated.
Dating Simulation games are neither adventures nor play novels. They a "simulation" game (in the sense of "SimCity" not in the sense of a flight sim) with heavy statistical elements.
Adventure games are a genre that exists in Japan, just as it does here, and describes games like Snatcher, Policenauts, Phantasy Star Adventure, etc. They're almost all menu-based, dialog heavy games with a first-person view. They're typically far simpler and less puzzle-intensive that our adventure games, which is why Westerners will leap to call them "Play Novels" even though they are clearly billed as Adventure Games on their promotional materials.
Actual Play Novels have barely any interaction at all. They're limited to a sort of "choose your own adventure" kind of interactivity and usually feature a few endings, but they're devoid of actual inventory or puzzles entirely. You can easily play one of these in Japanese without a walkthrough, with no idea what you're doing and get to the end. They're VERY simple.
Because all of these games sometimes delve into romantic plots and might have multiple endings where the character hooks up with different girls, Westerners sometimes call all of these games "Dating sims" when that term refers to games like Tokemiki Memorial that have a sim element.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_novel
Wikipedia probably isn't a good source, but the simple choose your own path ones with little interaction are kinetic novels I believe.
Visual novels was the word I was searching for.
I think the wikipedia article makes more sense, they really deserve their own genre.
Phoenix Wright is a step above visual novels though, although it's extremely linear and it's all reading, there is more interaction than other visual novels. I've only played Clannad and Persona 3 and 4 (they're half visual novel), but you gotta admit PW is borderline visual novel.
Other than one off hand reference to Phoenix Wright in the translation section, nothing about that article would seem to support PW as a Visual Novel. It looks like one overzealous individual threw it in as an off-hand reference in a way that wasn't accurate. Not the beginning of paragraph 2:
"In Japanese, a distinction is often made between visual novels proper (abbreviated NVL) and adventure games (abbreviated AVG or ADV). This distinction is normally lost in English."
I'm going by what these games are billed as by their creators. Visual Novels and Play Novels are Japanese genres, but they would NEVER be applied to a game like Phoenix Wright.
The Japanese also like to invent genres for a single game (if you ever look up the Tales of... games in Japan, it's hilarious the genres they bill them as. They're crazy stuff like "Learning the Importance of Precious Friendship RPGs" and stuff like that), and Phoenix Wright is one of those games (it's billed as a "Legal Battle" game).
But let's just take a clear-cut example: Phantasy Star Adventure. Adventure is in the title. It's the same kind of game as that. Case closed.
Point and click adventures to me is a story-driven adventure game with most of the time slow gameplay where you'll walk around talking to people and solve pussles. So I would agree that Pheonix Wright is an adventure game
It's one of my all time favorite game series, too!
Since people later corrupted the meaning of "adventure game" to mean stuff like Zelda, some people have latched onto Point-and-Click like it's a genre and not a control method and that's where we get all confused.
The PW games started on GBA. They're menu-based adventure games.