I'm not really the target audience but I still want to thank you for writing an extremely useful guide!

Both the guide and the troubleshooting section are so detailed they seem to be an excellent resource for beginners looking to run not just visual novels but any non-Steam game.

Oh, and the "This is a Japan-Only Game!" errors and workarounds gave me a chuckle.I had no idea Japan was so protective of their domestic games!

If someone gets value out of it then great but I have a couple questions. Is this for specifically Windows visual novels ? I ask because when playing Linux visual novels I usually just have to run the executable or at most right click>Properties>Permissions>check allow to execute as a program. I have never had to use a terminal to play a visual novel whether it be through Wine or if it's Linux native.

Last edited by PublicNuisance on 12 Aug 2023 at 10:14 pm UTC

I'm not really the target audience but I still want to thank you for writing an extremely useful guide!

Both the guide and the troubleshooting section are so detailed they seem to be an excellent resource for beginners looking to run not just visual novels but any non-Steam game.

Oh, and the "This is a Japan-Only Game!" errors and workarounds gave me a chuckle.I had no idea Japan was so protective of their domestic games!

Thanks for the feedback! This guide originally started as a "How to use Wine to Play Visual Novels" guide that would work for macOS players too, but given the amount of hours I put into researching Wine for several GNU/Linux distributions alone, I didn't feel like doing that for macOS too. Hopefully what is there is useful to macOS players. I tried to explain the component parts of Wine at the end of the Troubleshooting section so players still facing issues could do more digging on their own.

Japan is super protective of their games! Part of this is probably due to the adult content present. DMM, the digital store, requires a Japanese IP address at some point to validate the game, which I thought was a bit excessive. But it was a relief to know that many physical versions of visual novels aren't encumbered by DRM.

If someone gets value out of it then great but I have a couple questions. Is this for specifically Windows visual novels ? I ask because when playing Linux visual novels I usually just have to run the executable or at most right click>Properties>Permissions>check allow to execute as a program. I have never had to use a terminal to play a visual novel whether it be through Wine or if it's Linux native.

This guide is specifically for non-Steam, Windows-only games. That may sound very specific, but it encompasses a large range of visual novels. Most Japanese language visual novels aren't published on Steam, which is what I read. On the other hand, most English localizations of visual novels are published on Steam, but there are exceptions, like Muramasa: https://jastusa.com/page/the-state-of-muramasa

You don't need to use the terminal to install or play visual novels in Wine either. In fact, if you use openSUSE, you can follow the guide without touching the terminal at all. The terminal is unfortunately required on most distributions to install Wine, as it usually isn't available in the software store.

Once you've installed Wine, you don't need to touch the terminal again. For installing games, the Lutris installer wizard takes care of that very well. And once this code makes it to the next release of Lutris, you won't even need to launch Lutris with ja_JP.UTF-8 for Japanese visual novels anymore: https://github.com/lutris/lutris/pull/4946

You can, of course, decide not to install Wine system-wide and install only Lutris, as the Runtime bundles Wine and several other necessary dependencies. However, Lutris recommends installing these dependencies system-wide to avoid compatibility issues: https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/LutrisRuntime.md

Bottles has a similar runtime if you like that manager better.

If the AVN is renpy, I have Renpy SDK, so I simply rebuild it for Linux, takes 5 minutes tops. :D I've rebuilt about 50 AVN "Windows only" games that way.
If it's not renpy, I don't bother with it. As the famous saying "no tux - no bux" goes, I go similarly about AVNs: "no renpy - no bux". :)

your guide is really interesting thank you very much for sharing.

Thanks! I hope you find it useful.

If the AVN is renpy, I have Renpy SDK, so I simply rebuild it for Linux, takes 5 minutes tops. :D I've rebuilt about 50 AVN "Windows only" games that way.
If it's not renpy, I don't bother with it. As the famous saying "no tux - no bux" goes, I go similarly about AVNs: "no renpy - no bux". :)

I'm assuming "AVN" stands for "Adult Visual Novel"?

Ren'Py is a great engine and it's great that more visual novels are being built with it. You even see localizers rebuild some Japanese games in Ren'Py.

Ren'Py isn't even your only option for native! You can also run NScripter games like TRianThology with the free software clone, ONScripter, which does support GNU/Linux. I've written a short section on that here.

While I would love to share your opinion on native ports, I read the Japanese versions of visual novels. The market for native ports for 日本語 visual novels is essentially non-existent (with the exception of npckc's games on itch.io, like a year of springs.

If that were my baseline, I would need to rely exclusively on localizers to retain the original Japanese text in their releases, because no Japanese company, to my knowledge, has ever released a GNU/Linux binary for their visual novel. The venn diagram of Japanese Text + Native is embarrassingly tiny, although thankfully includes Higurashi, Umineko, and Amrilato, which are amazing VNs which will keep you busy for 200 hours. That's pretty much it, haha. Localized games with Japanese text are already rare, so I don't think it would expand much if you included Ren'Py games.

Well, actually, there are quite a few Japanese games you can play on GNU/Linux "natively". Novelgame has over a thousand free visual novels in Japanese you can play in your browser.

My rule is to not knowingly buy a game encumbered by DRM, which usually means buying the physical edition. And of course, they never tell you if it's encumbered by DRM, so it's a gamble...

I'm assuming "AVN" stands for "Adult Visual Novel"?

Ren'Py is a great engine and it's great that more visual novels are being built with it. You even see localizers rebuild some Japanese games in Ren'Py.

Ren'Py isn't even your only option for native! You can also run NScripter games like TRianThology

You assume correctly - that's what AVN stands for.

Judging by what I found that game TrianThology - anime isn't my thing. If it's not 3D (preferably with 3D animations) - no, thanks.

As for Ren'Py, it's FOSS and the majority of the devs keep to that rule, altough some remove the rpy files, leaving only and encrypting the resulting rpyc files, but I don't support (financially) such games. I'm not gonna steal anyone's game, like they probably fear, but having the source code rpy files means you can fix errors on site without waiting for the developer to fix them (or add a better font) and rebuilding the game doesn't always work as expected.

You assume correctly - that's what AVN stands for.

Judging by what I found that game TrianThology - anime isn't my thing. If it's not 3D (preferably with 3D animations) - no, thanks.

As for Ren'Py, it's FOSS and the majority of the devs keep to that rule, altough some remove the rpy files, leaving only and encrypting the resulting rpyc files, but I don't support (financially) such games. I'm not gonna steal anyone's game, like they probably fear, but having the source code rpy files means you can fix errors on site without waiting for the developer to fix them (or add a better font) and rebuilding the game doesn't always work as expected.

I'm not at all familiar with 3D visual novels—I ran into some on DLsite one time and Steam famously has Being a Dik. I assume these are English-only games. Are there a lot of these? I kind of assumed it was a pretty small niche, at least compared to Japanese visual novels.

That's definitely a cool feature of Ren'Py. I guess my favorite English Ren'Py visual novel would have to be Save the Date.

I feel like this guide's title gets more specific every time I get another comment! One of these days it's going to end up being, "How to Play non-Steam Windows-Only Japanese Visual Novels on GNU/Linux".

Are there a lot of these?

The AVN niche is still young and new, constantly growing but there are already at least 50 games I know of.

Are there a lot of these?

The AVN niche is still young and new, constantly growing but there are already at least 50 games I know of.

Well, it's good to hear visual novels are finding another niche in the western world! I'm not that into adult visual novels (or nukige, as the Japanese VN community tends to call them), although most VNs end up having an R18+ scene anyway... Personally, if it's not Japanese, and especially not 2D, I won't be playing it

We've all got our tastes, haha.

add as a non steam game and fiddle around with the proton version in compatibility tab for that thing you added as a non steam game

i even got battle net working just fine
and all the games install and work

I don't really like Steam as a client, and it's a proprietary client, so I don't feel comfortable recommending it to others where Steam games aren't concerned. I like Lutris because you usually never need to configure anything. You can easily install a game from disk and set it up automatically. Lutris lets you easily change Wine settings when you need to, whereas you need to set them as command-line launch options in Steam, which is pretty unfriendly.

In particular, changing your locale is really easy in Lutris. Well, after I submitted these patches for searching for installed locales and selecting a locale on installation, which was only possible because Lutris is free software. Any problems with the Steam client are only fixable by Valve.

It's worth mentioning that Proton can have worse compatibility for games not built with the Steam Runtime in mind, as the developer for Proton-GE declares in no uncertain terms here. He recommends using Wine-GE, which retains all the improvements from Proton without the incompatible parts.

But if you managed to get the games working, that's great! I've found that the biggest thing to watch out for with Japanese visual novels is DRM. We've got an incomplete list of what DRM works and what doesn't here. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about that except not buy the games...

that must be a rough life, knowing how to easily fix a problem but refusing to over it not being free open source software, meanwhile i love starfield on my pc and i did tell you exactly how to fix your issue, good luck with that attitude

I probably use more non-free software than most people on this site, if we discount games

Honestly, I'm not religious about free software. I just prefer being able to fix problems when they arise, as I did with Lutris. The Steam client was broken in a major way for months before Valve finally fixed it. Thank you for offering another option for managing Wine (sorry for being a bit abrasive before), but I'm happy with Lutris, really! I use Steam for Steam games, but I prefer having more control over Wine using Lutris for non-Steam games.

But Steam Client, Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bottles, or just plain invoking Wine from the command-line, none of those fix my biggest problem with visual novels on GNU/Linux, which is the DRM it's encumbered with.

If you can get a game from DMM working on Steam, let me know! I will happily use whatever method works to play those games on GNU/Linux. Hell, I might have even paid for Cedega if it was still around.