Key visual novels are great for beginners and are usually very far removed from your typical complex visual novel. The atmosphere and characters they provide are also addicting! If you’re interested, read further:
Recently, I found out that Kanon, Air, Clannad, and a bunch of other Key classics have been ported to the Switch with new graphics, as well as insanely useful features like being able to go back to previpus dialogue!
You can legally purchase them from sites like yesasia, or used a hacked switch and download them for free if you have no morals like me.
The Japanese fonts have been upgraded and are much more noticeable when compared to their PC counterparts, and it does seem unlikely that (and this is quite unfortunate) we will receive any PC versions with these upgrads. Clannad was actually released on Steam with the updates from the Switch port since Clannad was so popular, however no Japanese PC version if I recall corretly was sold or included so a steam user had to make a patch for the game using the Chinese version as a base (not even kidding.)
It is unlikely we will see the other Japanese Key games already ported to the switch getting a PC release as far as I can tell and it appears that most of them (especially Kanon) won’t be receiving a western switch release.
Having said that, I think an on-the-go simplistic visual novel experience (with everything upgraded from the old pc versions) is truly one of the most thrilling experience to get motivated to do some Japanese study.
What are your thoughts on using these new visual novel ports? Have you ever used visual novels for studying on console? Most of us do 99% of our VN reading on PC but examining the aspects of console learning has gotten me super interested!
5 comments
Just a tip to learners: don’t try Rewrite until your vocab size is stupidly high, otherwise it’ll take you literally years to finish the VN (assuming you add most unknown words you come across into Anki). There are [29k](https://jpdb.io/visual-novel-difficulty-list?q=rewrite#a) unique words, which is a bafflingly high number for a visual novel that size.
You can also transfer your Nintendo Switch account to Japan and buy what you want using Nintendo gifts cards bought on Amazon (ニンテンドープリペイド番号 9000円|オンラインコード版).
I love visual novels but I haven’t heard of a Key novel before.
Just finished watching the little busters anime and I loved it. I’ll surely read the vn someday!
When you say beginner, what’s the difficulty level? I’ve studied mostly grammar so far up to N3, but my vocabulary is weak because I haven’t done much immersion at this point.