Hello, so after a long break and inconsistency from learning Japanese I'm back again.
I want to start reading my first Visual Novel with the help oh Visual Novel Reader (you will love this if you want to or are reading Visual Novels and have to look up a lot of words and are sometimes unsure of the meaning of the sentence. This program converts the text so you can copy it and look up the words with Rikaichan. It also gives an pretty good translation of the sentence)

But anyways it said that the lenght is from 30-40 hours. Is this the time needed to play every route or just like 1-2 routes? And how accurate are the time informations in general?
Because I don't think that I will ever finish the VN if it really would normally take 40 hours. In the speed I'm reading it would be more like 400 hours...(looking up the words and if I don't understand a sentence thinking about the grammar and even if I understand everything I'm reading so slow)

If you are using VNDB to get your times, they say in the guidelines under FAQ that Length is time to complete all the endings and is generally arbitrary. Depending on the type of VN you are tackling, you might consider counting the number of main characters in the game and add 2-3 count (cover bad endings plus harem endings depending on game type). Then divide the length by that to get a good feel for route length.

Problem is this still won't give a good estimate really. I think the length times on VNDB are there for semi-decent Japanese learners but maybe not fluent/native speakers. I've played English VNs (translated) and you can really get through text pretty fast if you can read at native speed. The other thing about length is that guidelines might not mention if these lengths cover re-reading already seen text for a new route. A lot of game makers reuse a lot of the text between routes to reduce script creation. Often times these games will have the feature built in to just hit/hold CTRL and blow past all the text you've already seen until you hit something new you haven't seen.

For time lengths you should just play some VN, see what sites say about the length and keep that "figure" in mind when you play a new one. Then start judging new games against old games you played.

Just beware that most of the famous VNs out there (those that became anime) are going to be long, like book long. Fate/stay night? Really long, and it doesn't even have a "route" per say (you unlock new routes by replaying it again, from what I heard). Any game by Key? (Little Busters, Air, Clannad, etc.) Really ***** long.

EDIT: I'll also add that for H-games, once you have got most of the vocab down that 'occurs' a lot in them, you'll find it reused a lot. Sometimes you get writers that get cute and make up new bizarre words but that's easy to adapt to. Normal VN are a different story though and can be more related to reading a light novel quite often I think.

Thank you vix86. You helped me out a lot. Good to know that the length is for every route and every ending.
Too bad that many VNs from Key are so long. I guess I have to read them some time later.

Thanks.

It's not just Key. VNs are just long in general.

Quote:Too bad that many VNs from Key are so long. I guess I have to read them some time later.

Planetarian is actually short. Kanon and Air have less than half as much text as Rewrite, Little Busters and Clannad. http://tlwiki.org/index.php?title=VN/Eroge_Script_sizes

Vempele Wrote:

Quote:Too bad that many VNs from Key are so long. I guess I have to read them some time later.

Planetarian is actually short. Kanon and Air have less than half as much text as Rewrite, Little Busters and Clannad. http://tlwiki.org/index.php?title=VN/Eroge_Script_sizes

Planetarian is far below average for non-nukige. I said in general.