Complicating things more so was the fact that most BL games fall into two disparate categories, yaoi games, which generally feature slender and toned young men in dramatic romantic relationships, (the primary fanbase being female gamers), and bara games, which tend to focus on muscular men in more overtly sexual situations.
(Titles featuring male protagonists in romantic/sexual relationships with other men.) Even within Japan, this sub-genre of visual novels usually remained on the outskirts of the gaming community. Yet among this eclectic mix of visual novels being offered, there was still a particular style of VN that was almost completely unexplored in the west, BL games. Those doubts were soon quashed, and otome games began to foster dedicated fan communities all over the globe. But even after the advent of visual novels in the English gaming market and beyond, many still believed that this particular form of the genre would not be able to find an audience outside of Japan. The breakthrough of these varying types of visual novels in the west, from the mainstream successes, to the most niche of releases, eventually led to the appearance of otome games, a sub-genre of VNs geared towards women starring female protagonists, primarily featuring them in romantic situations with a gaggle of male suitors. (Most primarily marketed toward straight male gamers.) Meanwhile, companies dedicated to the English release of some of the more obscure and niche forms of visual novels began to spring up in the US, offering players a chance to experience games running the gamut of Japanese slice-of-life stories, mind bending cerebral horror, and extreme erotica. The success of the Ace Attorney games paved the way for other popular VN series like Zero Escape and DanganRonpa, which have fostered adamant cult followings.
That all changed when a certain western publisher decided to take a chance on a peculiar series, Ace Attorney, starring a plucky defense attorney, and the age of the English visual novel was upon us. While a few VNs managed to make their way over to the US and beyond (to little fanfare), many thought the genre was destined to remain a curiosity, exclusive to Japan. Outside of the import crowd or those in the niche PC game market, visual novels were something most people outside of Japan read about in small, quarter page blurbs in the miscellaneous news section of their favorite gaming publication, or on fan-fueled fringe sites. Visual Novels, a genre that not even ten years ago was a foreign concept to many western gamers.
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