Where can one get visual novels?

[DarkNozomi]

Legally I mean; I'm not interested in downloading them from torrents, and Japanese copies are impossible to get over here (and wouldn't work on American systems anyhow)

Just curious... anyone have any experience in locating any?

[Crossfire]

Whoop, misread that as "light novel".

[DarkNozomi]

Actually, I had hoped to get them in English... I brought one back with me from Japan which eventually worked, but It takes almost an hour per page to figure out what is being said (each Kanji needs to be looked up and/or translated to Hiragana, and then to Romanji, and then put through an online translator to get English, recorded, and then shift the word order around until it makes some semblance of meaning).

[blkmage]

Short answer: you can't.

Not as short answer: if you're lucky, you can find it on Mangagamer or the iOS store.

Real answer:
1. Make sure the game you want has a translation patch.
2. Import the game from Japan, probably from amazon.co.jp. You might be surprised at how expensive it is. Yes, it actually retails for that much.
3. Make sure Windows is set to JP locale.
4. Install game, install patch.

[Crossfire]

Edit: I'm an idiot, I read "visual novel" as "light novel". Can't believe it took me three posts to realize this.

[DaughterOfZion]

Well, do you want original Japanese visual novels or are one's made by Americans okay as well?

[Zeldafan2]

Ren'py has an entire site with all types of visual novels availiable for free to download legally. Most of these are pretty short, (with the notable exception of Katawa Shoujo) but from what I hear some of them can be pretty good.

However, retail visual novels (ie. Clannad, Little Busters, Kanon), are mostly not distributed in America as previously stated. The market for visual novels in America is TINY. JAST USA may actually be the biggest distributor of these titles, and they are still pretty small. Too bad their titles are all eroge, though....

You can buy Visual novels like the ones I mentioned previously online at say, Jbox. However, they are not distributed in America, so you cannot find them in english unless you found a fan translation of the game.

[KazeShiki]

Mangagamer is probably your best bet. I know Planetarian got an official iOS release recently as well. Importing from Japan and using English patches would be the most efficient way and would open up a lot of options on what to read.

[Kaori]

Even if you know no Japanese whatsoever, there has got to be an easier and faster way to go about translating your VN than what you're doing. How about doing a text dump (or finding a script from someone else's) and then copying and pasting the Japanese text into whatever online translator you're using? I know that Google Translate can translate Asian fonts and assume that others can as well, so that would negate the need to go from kanji to kana to romaji. Alternately, there are a lot of faster ways of looking up kanji compounds rather than looking up each individual kanji one by one. I've heard that there's an app for iPhone and iPod touch that will translate kanji for you if you take a picture of it or something like that, and I'm pretty sure there's also an app that will let you draw the kanji compound and will translate it directly for you (this would let you look up the kanji compound directly rather than figuring out how it would be written in kana and then looking it up based on the kana or romaji). Electric dictionaries will do the same thing but are much pricier than just downloading an iPhone/iPod app.

^I know this doesn't address your original question about how to acquire VNs, but it might make the translation process for the one you already have less slow and painful.

[blkmage]

There are programs called text hookers that do that. Essentially, they intercept system calls and extract text as it shows up on screen. The one I used briefly also automatically came up with a rough machine translation and had built-in kanji lookup. But even that took enough effort that I just decided to wait for the translation patch to be finished instead.

[SierraLea]

There are stores that sell them, they're just few and far between. I would try finding one in your area. Online shopping is also a great resource.

[Atria35]

Ren'py has an entire site with all types of visual novels availiable for free to download legally. Most of these are pretty short, (with the notable exception of Katawa Shoujo) but from what I hear some of them can be pretty good.

However, retail visual novels (ie. Clannad, Little Busters, Kanon), are mostly not distributed in America as previously stated. The market for visual novels in America is TINY. JAST USA may actually be the biggest distributor of these titles, and they are still pretty small. Too bad their titles are all eroge, though....

My two picks are Ren'Py (which has links to fan-made VNs and professional ones (the prof ones will usually link to to a site where you pay to download, while the free fan-mades range anywhere from bad to supremely good).

MangaGamer is all about VNs, and you can buy plenty to download from there. A lot are eroge, though.

And believe it or not, Steam has a small number of them. The one that I've been playing recently is Magical Diary.