Some of the best anime comes from popular source material - mangas, light novels, video games among others. That makes sense. If there is a market for these genres, it makes commercial sense to make it more mainstream, in order to target newer audiences and fall back on established audiences in the event that it does not prove a popular as believed.
Anime, by definition, is given a far greater toolset to craft its narrative; it has the advantages of colour, sound and movement, just to name a few, to bring the beloved characters from the source material to life. It seems like making an anime adaptation of the source material is almost a sure way to make it better.
That is not a recipe for success, though. Many anime fall through the cracks, producing mediocre anime that is far inferior to the source material. The reasons for that are many - perhaps the storytelling of the source material does not translate well to anime, perhaps the screenwriter decides to cut essential parts of the source material, maybe the anime studio ran out of funds and resources to produce a satisfactory conclusion.
Unfortunately, for every brilliant anime adaptation that excels and surpasses its source material counterpart, there are dozen others that fail to live up to its lofty aspirations, or worse, completely does not do its source material justice. Any nowhere is this more apparent that in anime series that deals with visual novels as its source material.
Visual novels are curious things. Neither a novel nor a game, it straddles a fine line between reading and gameplay, without fully committing to either, creating an experience that no other medium can replicate. A visual novel is ultimately a text-based medium with anime-style graphics and voice-acting to supplement the story. Most visual novels have 'routes' which are branching storylines to romance different characters, and have multiple endings.
Some of the best anime of the era have source material based on visual novels - Fate/Stay Night, Steins;Gate, CLANNAD, just to name a few, but much more have terrible adaptations that simply tarnish the reputation of the original game, which are far more interesting. Of course, not all visual novels are of good quality, but the better ones are usually selected for adaptation, and most of them fail to live up to the source material. Visual novels such as the Grisaia Trilogy, Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm and Tsukihime which are pretty much universally praised in the visual novel community have horrifying poor adaptations that effectively decimates the number of people willing to check out the source material, which is a real shame.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, visual novels are fairly long, which means a studio has to made particularly egregious cuts to made the story fit a typically 12-13 episode format. Secondly, visual novels usually have branching routes, which means the visual novel has to favour a certain heroine, thereby alienating the audiences that prefer another heroine. But more importantly, they must twist the story to fit each heroine's main conflict and then move back to the narrative of the central heroine. Thirdly, visual novels usually have a lot of subtext and internal monologue of a character, which gives the reader a clear understanding of a character's thoughts, feelings and dilemmas, but these monologues are usually not feasible in an anime format.
There are many more reasons, but these are some reasons why I refuse to watch any anime adaptation of a visual novel if the visual novel has a chance of receiving an English translation, unless there is beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would ever receive one. There are exceptions, of course, but some narratives, when given the time to develop the characters and understand the motivations and mindsets of characters, can become incredible stories that transcend even the medium, and anime, with its 12-13 or even 24-26 episode constraints just cannot do justice.
Some visual novels have some of the greatest stories I have ever read in fiction, with the Muv-Luv series, Fate/Stay Night and G-senjou no Maou (The Devil on G-string) being some of my absolute favourites. If you are a true anime fan, and want to experience some of the greatest stories that fiction has to offer with a Japanese anime twist, then I urge you to try visual novels.
I took the plunge 10 years ago and have never looked back. Will you?
