I found out about Wrong Planet through Wikipedia, actually. Took me a while to make an account though. My interests primarily include video games and anime/manga/light novels/visual novels. I also read "regular" books, but I have a hard time finding series that I like these days. Thinking about starting The Wheel of Time, and I'd really like to get into Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, but the first half of the first book (The Dragonbone Chair), which is around 600 pages, is really slow, while the second half is all action, from what I've read about it. I'm mainly a fantasy and sci-fi person. If a series could conceivably happen in real life, it usually doesn't interest me much.
As for what light and visual novels are, that's a whole separate wall of text. I'll try to be succinct, so bear with me. Light novels are short books (usually 200 to 300 pages) that are typically released every three to six months in Japan. They usually have a character from the series on the cover, drawn anime-style, with a few illustrations of important events in the book spread throughout. The plots usually aren't too different from what you'd find in an anime or manga series, as a lot of the tropes are the same. They'll also usually go on for a few years at the least, and a few have been going on for over ten. If you're willing to give one a chance, may I recommend Spice and Wolf? If the author name wasn't Japanese, and the cover illustration wasn't obviously anime-style, I guarantee you it would be more well known and impossible to tell that it emerged from the same medium.
Now, visual novels... they're computer "games" with a very heavy or exclusive focus on story, often with no gameplay outside of choices that influence the route the game takes. In other words, some have multiple directions the plot can take, but not all. They've got text overlayed on the screen or in a text box at the bottom along with character sprites (images), background images and music, and sometimes voice acting (in Japanese). They can range in genre, too. Two I recommend are the murder mystery When the Seagulls Cry/Umineko no Naku Koro ni (Information on purchasing and patching the game into English here plus a free demo.) and the time-travel thriller Steins;Gate (You can buy it here for Windows.). Umineko is available for both Windows and Mac OS X (and it's possible to get it working on Linux, too, if you're up to fiddling a bit - no WINE needed!).
Sorry, this turned into an advertisement, but I really like spreading good series that most people won't give a chance because they're unfamiliar with them, and I feel that pure-text books are less off-putting to people than manga/comics or anime/cartoons, while the novelty of a computer "game" might interest them more as well.
21 Feb 2015, 1:01 am
