On Monday, a team of fan translators celebrated the birth of the visual novel with an English patch for 1996's Japanese PC-98 game Shizuku. In the mid-90s, recently established development studio Leaf—which at that point had only made a strip mahjong game and an adult JRPG—launched a "Visual Novel Series" of three adult games, beginning with Shizuku. Leaf's style of adventure game would soon become a phenomenon.
It feels a bit shakier to say that Leaf invented the visual novel, even if the studio coined the term. As talked about in detail in the video from YouTuber Bowl of Lentils above, Shizuku was heavily inspired by developer Chunsoft's "sound novels" for the Super Nintendo like Otogirisō, which were basically, well, simple visual novels. Chunsoft's adventure games placed text over static backgrounds and let you make choices at key narrative moments, much like other adventure games dating back to the 1980s. Audio was there to help heighten the storytelling despite the limited graphics.
