What would you consider to be the most innovative visual novel of all time?

[Happiness+]

Be honest.

[Dreamysyu]

I don't know, you need to play a lot more VNs than I did to be able to answer this question seriously.

From the ones I personally played, Fata Morgana is probably the most unique VN. There's also Umineko. I wouldn't really call them innovative though. I think, this word generally implies that there should be many other works that would appear after them and use the same novel tropes, but none of that happened to Fata Morgana or Umineko. If I try to think about this word in that meaning, then I don't know. Maybe whatever VN first tried to use the dating sim elements to make a serious story.

 

[onorub]

Machi. I mean, look at the images. As far as production values go, that might have been the last revolutionary VN.

[Kenshin_sama]

Nekopara. Whoever thought to utilize bouncing boobs in that game deserves a Nobel Prize.

[Clephas]

Relative to the era in which it was released?  Tsukihime.  There was literally nothing like Tsukihime at the time it was released, and it set the precedent for doujin circles going professional, which was one of the reasons for the rapid explosion in plotge that occurred in the years immediately after. 

The question is too broadly defined, lol.

[Funyarinpa]

If we mean "takes the medium and takes the places it never went to before" I'd wager Umineko is the one. 

But if we mean "influenced the behavior of the people in the industry (esp. developers) going forward" then honestly no idea, maybe except games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa paving the way of the normalization of the industry by performing as "gateway VNs".

[Freestyle80]

Hard to answer, Chaos;Child i guess? Liked how it told the story through delusions (good and bad) and the mystery was pretty solid, after reading it, I can see how the anime totally butchered it (though it didnt really stand a chance, it was 50 hours of content condensed into less than 7)

[littleshogun]

As for the presentation, I think Shibuya Scramble here is stand out the most seeing that it did have many photograph of people even in the background so we can say that Shibuya Scramble here is like the movie here. Also don't forget that you need to reach the bad endings first before find out the good one, or so that's what I remember. Oh and Machi there is the predecesscor of Shibuya Scramble, but if we focusing on translated VN I think it's still count.

Other than Shibuya Scramble, there's Soukoku no Arterial for the untranslated VN with it's very unique card battle that still stands out among all of the VN with card battle seeing that it did have unique art for the cards, and as far as VN concerned I think this is the only VN with emphasize on Collectible Card Game. Some Yu-Gi-Oh player may like this considering that it's almost looks exactly like that, only that there's no meta game for Soukoku no Arterial.

Speaking about Ace Attorney, I still think that Prosecutor Path here is very innovative with the name localization, and that's said a lot where in fact there's no official translation for this. Instead what we have here is a fan translated version of the VN, in which if they felt lazy they can just localized the well known AA recurring characters like Edgeworth and leave the new characters name in Japanese name lol. So yeah just looking from of how they localized all the characters name including the new one, I would say that it's innovative enough.

Edited December 30, 2018 by littleshogun