It offers a brief overview of the visual novel game genre as a game genre where the presence of characters constituted by what Azuma (2007 2009) defined as ‘database elements’, character building blocks which, by virtue of their commonality within fan culture, constitute each an access point and an expression of the wider fan culture as a whole.
This article examines Japanese visual novel games, an under-researched game genre whose main feature is character-driven prose storylines in light of existing scholarship on characters and manga/anime aesthetics (Azuma 2007 & 2009 Galbraith 2009 & 2011 Nozawa 2013 Kacsuk 2016).
