The game that coined the term 'visual novel' just got its first-ever fan translation for its 30th anniversary

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.