What are Visual Novels (aka VNs)?

As this blog is going to have a lot of it devoted to visual novels, I suppose I should clarify what visual novels actually are, since many people outside East Asia (primarily Japan where VNs are well known) may not have even heard of them.

A screenshot from the visual novel Rewrite

Classifying whether a game is a true 'visual novel' or only 'visual novel-esque' is pretty subjective, but, generally speaking, VNs are video games with large amounts of text. Usually the text is used in along with both music (sometimes called 'background music' or BGM) and 2D artwork. Newer visual novels often have voice acting included, too, and various degrees of animation (keep in mind as most VNs are Japanese in origin, the voice acting is also in Japanese, although that doesn't really detract anything for me). In this respect, reading a visual novel is much like reading a book but watching anime at the same time; it's pretty unique.

A CG, or 'computer graphic', taken from Muv Luv Alternative. CGs are like still
shots that you see occasionally in game that help to encapsulate what is happening in the story