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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

> For context, visual novels are basically ~novella sized stories

Usually, but some of them are infamously ludicrously long. Like 2-3x War and Peaces long.

Got curious about the actual distribution so ran some queries on vndb [1].

Looks like the median renpy novel (with 100+ votes) takes 250min to complete with the ludicrously long ones [2] bringing the average up to 503min.

    engine      vn count  avg     25%     50%     75%  
    Ren'Py      251       503     120     251     571  
    KiriKiri    187       813     241     522     1143 
    Unity       65        871     224     452     1109

[1] https://query.vndb.org/?sql=SELECT+%0D%0A++++r.engine%2C+%0D...

[2] https://query.vndb.org/?sql=SELECT%0D%0Avn.title%2C%0D%0AROU...

    title                       length (min)        engine
    HEAVEN BURNS RED            12580               CRIware
    Rance X -Kessen-            11085               AliceSoft System4.X
    Shoujo Settai               10418           
    Kamidori Alchemy Meister    8407                
    Seinarukana...              6858                
    Lessons in Love             6819                Ren'Py
    Sengoku † Koihime...        6744                CatSystem2
    Higurashi no Naku Koro ni   6626

Keep in mind that several of these titles are hybrid VNs, i.e. games that mix visual novel narration with gameplay elements. This has a tendency to inflate the playtime disproportionately to the actual word count, though VNDB does require that a significant amount of play-time is spent reading for games listed on there in the first place.

Off the top of my head, hybrid VNs on your list includes HEAVEN BURNS RED, Rance X, Kamidori, Seinarukana, and Koihime. Though as far as I know, Rance X in particular also has a very, very long script

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