Collage
There aren’t really a lot of visual novels I would consider to be truly great. It’s a young medium, and word count usually ends up being considered more important than quality. A lot of attention is placed on big, flashy, over-sexed and overly verbose commercial titles; really, we’re sort of in a rut. So there isn’t a lot that’s really all that great.
Collage is truly great.
It has the perfect soundtrack. Screenshots are misleading; visually, it combines minimalism with a fantastic use of animation as a form of punctuation. Most importantly, it’s a wonderful story with just enough grounding to have an impact, and manages to dance between different perspectives way better than I’ve ever been able to.
There’s a few things about it that don’t quite work; the dead-end choices don’t really make much sense in what’s a completely linear story, the little girl character is perhaps a little well spoken, and some of the photography ends up being pretty familiar to anyone who’s read more than a few doujin visual novels. None of that stops it from being a well told story that rings true.
It’s a bit of a pain to get running on Windows. It’s worth it. If you haven’t read it, you absolutely must right now. I’ve also just recently managed to get an OS X version wrapped in Wine working pretty well– which is what inspired this post– so there’s absolutely no excuse.
It’s not the most important visual novel, and it’s definitely not well known, but it’s certainly the most well written. If there’s proof that the medium’s got great potential, it’s Collage.
