Screenshot of Kanon (1999)

The visual novel genre primarily gained popularity in Japanese during the late 80s and early 90s. Companies such as Chunsoft and Leaf are often considered some of the earliest developers of these games and JAST, as a publisher, was heavily responsible for bringing them to the west. Nowadays, it's expected that Japanese visual novels either ship with an English localisation or some true patriots will go through the trouble of manually patching it into the game themselves, releasing a localisation patch for people to enjoy for free.

Until around 2010, it was essentially required that visual novels be “eroge”, or “erotic games”. From the late 80s to the late 2000s/early 2010s just about all the major visual novel developers were producing eroge. All ages releases were there but the most popular ones were generally adult games. Games such as ToHeart from Leaf, Fate Stay/Night and Tsukihime from Type-Moon and AIR and Kanon from Key were all incredibly popular eroge during this period. While Leaf was dying out, Key and Type-Moon transitioned into making more all ages games. Key transitioned out with CLANNAD, Type-Moon a lot later with Mahoyo (Witch on the Holy Night).

This page contains a collection of visual novels I like and some of my thoughts about them

An emotional sci-fi adventure VN with a focus on conspiracy. This is definitely one of my favourites in the SciADV series. There's never a dull moment for the entire runtime of the VN and I highly, HIGHLY recommend not only playing it but going for the true ending. The anime adaptation is quite good but the visual novel is still much better in my opinion, though it's not as big of a gap as… literally any of the other SciADV game adaptations. Though MAGES. have fallen out of favour since, this is still a great visual novel and will almost certainly remain in my top 5 for a very long time.

The relationships between characters are deep and emotionally gripping, MAGES. did effectively invent the chuunibyou protagonist + tsundere heroine trope after all. There's also a route for every major character so you won't have to worry about not spending enough time with them. The only exception to this, really, is Moeka. However, if you're a Moeka fan, then I would recommend you try RE:BOOT (the 2026 remake) instead as some content specifically focused on Moeka is included that was originally from a spin-off.

If you do wish to experience it, I recommend you look into the CoZ patches. Committee of Zero have developed fan translation/improvement patches for all the SciADV games because the official translations… well, they suck. The official English localisations you'll find on Steam struggle to maintain cohesive phrasing and that really diminishes the experience as a major part of what makes the series so special is the themes and references. Improvement patches exist for almost all the SciADV games so if you want to read any of them I cannot recommend Committee of Zero enough. I've read both translations and the difference is night and day.