What’s the longest Visual Novel?

[Happiness+]

I love how we still don’t have a clear answer here. 

So many contenders for longest visual novel to date, but no winner for some reason.

[Mr Poltroon]

32 minutes ago, Happiness+ said:

I love how we still don’t have a clear answer here. 

So many contenders for longest visual novel to date, but no winner for some reason.

I'm afraid there simply isn't a good way to count or measure size, and even if there were, most people would be sceptical of it and act as if it were any other.

[Rain Spectre]

The simple fact of "what is the longest book ever written" is a subject of constant debate by scholars. Why is it a surprise VN's are no different?

[Happiness+]

5 hours ago, Mr Poltroon said:

I'm afraid there simply isn't a good way to count or measure size, and even if there were, most people would be sceptical of it and act as if it were any other.

Yes there is, for the translated ones we can count actual word count from the game script. There are even programs that do that for us these days. The untranslated ones, we can take the average reading speed and infer the time it would take for someone to read it to completion. It would be a rough estimate, but it wouldn’t be a bad way to measure the size since Japanese words and phrases hold more information than English in terms of density. 

2 hours ago, Rain Spectre said:

The simple fact of "what is the longest book ever written" is a subject of constant debate by scholars. Why is it a surprise VN's are no different?

Excuse me, but wasn’t there a book that won a Guinness world record for longest novel?

*1 second Google Search later*

Yeah, it was that one by Marcel Prost, in search of lost time. 

Well that debate has been settled, to be fair, we don’t have a Guinness world record category....YET.

 

[Silvz]

It is important to note that although there are so many Higurashi arcs, they were not all written by Ryukishi, and they were released during the course of many years and different systems.

[Rain Spectre]

Well, plenty of VNs aren't fully written by their authors. Are they automatically discounted?

[Happiness+]

1 hour ago, Silvz said:

It is important to note that although there are so many Higurashi arcs, they were not all written by Ryukishi, and they were released during the course of many years and different systems.

Good point. I was satisfied with with the festival accompying arc, but I would read more if they were localized like the mangas, like Onisarashi-hen.

 

36 minutes ago, Rain Spectre said:

Well, plenty of VNs aren't fully written by their authors. Are they automatically discounted?

What do you mean?