Playing Visual Novels on Linux
Playing Visual Novels on Linux
What steps, if any, do you guys take on the linux distribution of your choice to play visual novels?
I, personally, set the following in my .bashrc
alias vn='env WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 wine start '
so I can just type vn gameExecutable.exe and usually just have the game work.
For the games I've had for a while, I have .desktop entries in my $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications directory with more specific commands as needed.
If you guys have any other tricks up your sleeves, please feel free to share them here.
For Japanese players, you'll want to get your VNs from DLSite as long as it's sold without DRM or only with PlayDRM, which works through WINE. SoftDenchi doesn't work with WINE, so don't buy VNs with that. Also, don't buy VNs from DMM, because they only sell VNs with DRM that doesn't work with WINE. Don't bother buying from Johren.
Mangagamer is one of the very few English localizers that sells a scarce few games with both the Japanese and English text intact. The games I know of that are like this are the Higurashi and Umineko series, and The Expression Amrilato. I recommend buying from them directly, rather than from Steam, because the Steam versions are hard (or impossible) to hook into with Textractor because of DRM, probably. Plus, they're cheaper on Mangagamer, and Steam doesn't like VNs. You can also buy Higurashi from GOG.
Lastly, buy physical releases because the majority of them have no DRM or use AlphaROM, which you can legally bypass by downloading a file from the DRM company on their website. Some physical releases come with DRM that doesn't work with WINE.
Also, if the files/folders are in Japanese, use unar to unarchive it. No other unarchiving tool has a 100% success rate for unarchiving Japanese-encoded text. It's designed for macOS, but some distributions also package and compile it.
This page is the most useful thing I've found for setting up VNs and debugging common issues: https://learnjapanese.moe/vn-linux/
It seems to have been developed on top of this gist from eshrh, which itself was built on top of kamui's gist (no longer exists): https://gist.github.com/eshrh/5bbf4deab58fefdab9eacf77b450efc0
In particular, they mention fjfix for その花びら novels and other furigaya VNs, which is sometimes necessary, sometimes not. It also mentions the SHIFT-JIS character encoding which is required for some novels, which I originally learned of years ago from a reddit post: https://brokendragontranslation.com/shift_jis_linux.html
For some reason, all of the files on that learnjapanese.moe page are re-hosted on Discord, and it doesn't link to the guy who developed fjfix or Broken Dragon Translations, which is kind of odd.
I really wish VNDB listed what DRM a release is encumbered with; that way, you wouldn't need to gamble when you pay for a physical release. The only decent advice I've gotten for finding out if a novel has DRM is to check on EGS: https://erogamescape.dyndns.org
I recommend running Gamescope for games you can't fullscreen, which I needed for some その花びら novels. It's a pretty cool project. It runs even on X.org with a NVIDIA card. The easiest way I found to run Gamescope is to integrate it with Lutris. Cheers to Valve and Sourcehut for developing Gamescope.
That's all for just running VNs. If you're also learning Japanese, here are some additional tips:
- Install Yomichan and a bunch of dictionaries.
- Install Anki and AnkiConnect to make cards quickly.
- animecards.site has a pretty good guide for setting up Anki cards you extract from your VNs.
- Install your VNs in a WINE prefix and install Textractor in the same WINE prefix.
- Install transformers_ocr to OCR text from VNs if you're running them natively or can't hook into them with Textractor. There's Kamui's Gazou as well, which is also based on Tesseract, but I think transformers_ocr is simpler and easier to use.
- Install ames to quickly export audio/images from your VN to your Anki cards.
Okay, I clearly have a lot to learn. Glad to have someone like you here, and thanks for the comprehensive post!
Edit: I would feature this comment, but I'm not exactly sure how...
Happy if it helps! It's kind of sad that so much of "getting VNs working" involves cataloguing different flavors of DRM and whether they work through WINE. What I wouldn't give for a database of "this release's DRM works through WINE".
I doubt Valve will ever put any money toward getting these particular brands of DRM working through Proton because <1% of Japanese VN publishers publish their games on Steam, and Valve seems to want to distance themselves from the image of VNs anyway. It's almost entirely localizers publishing on Steam.
Oh, and for learning Japanese on GNU+Linux, as Tatsumoto would call it, there's: https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io
They're kind of in a war with The Moe Way (TMW)/learnjapanese.moe...I don't know the finer details, but Tatsumoto has taken some information from their site and republished it on his site, pretending it's his own. Tatsumoto also pinched commits from TMW's fork of Yomichan for his own fork—which is perfectly okay, it's free software, but he doesn't seem to have added much himself and seems to have given up on it for now.
I don't really think TMW has much of a leg to stand on considering how much they encourage copyright infringement of other people's stuff over there, but it's worth mentioning TMW community produces a lot of cool software, just as Tatsumoto does.
Things get weird sometimes, but both communities have a lot of useful stuff, so it's worth perusing their websites.
Honestly I've never had any issues with just using wine and ever since Valve announced proton I just add the
.exeto Steam and run it that wayI vaguely remember having issues with a few games, but I don't have any of the details. I think getting japanese locale generated fixed most things for me.