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.
Leaf's big "innovation" was to focus more on depicting its characters on-screen, which makes sense considering it was an erotic game. Shizuku was also predated by groundbreaking (and wildly popular) dating sim Tokimeki Memorial, which emphasized its graphics to similar effect. But "visual novel" was such a catchy name, it stuck with us for 30 years to become the de facto phrase to describe pretty much any adventure game that prioritizes text over interactivity.
Shizuku was only a modest success, but the third game in the Visual Novel Series, To Heart, hit big, making Leaf a major player in adult adventure games in the years to come. A remake of To Heart landed on Steam last year with an English translation and no adult scenes.
Leaf's parent company Aquaplus, which publishes non-adult-themed games, is still going strong, and these days is best known for the Utawarerumono beat 'em up series. The most recent just landed on Steam in December 2025.
I played two hours of the new Shizuku translation last night. While I'm not the biggest fan of the font, the script itself reads very well. I definitely wouldn't recommend Shizuku to most people (it's very NSFW) but it's really fascinating to finally play this historically important VN in English.
— @bowloflentils.bsky.social (@bowloflentils.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-01-28T00:55:33.349Z
Shizuku likely isn't of much interest to actually play today unless you're fascinated with the history of visual novels. But if that's you, you can find a copy on the Internet Archive and get it running, with the English patch applied, in the PC-98 emulator Neko Project 21/W.
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