While browsing YouTube and Twitter, we found that the popular gaming YouTuber BijuuMike (3.47 million subscribers) has created a channel dedicated to all kinds of Japanese-style games, including visual novels. He’s already uploaded his first video; it’s about a Danganronpa-inspired game called Project Eden’s Garden.
Other notable English-speaking content creators who cover visual novel-related topics include Sydsnap (765k subscribers), Red Bard (240k subscribers), and OtakuDaiKun (90.3k subscribers). Visual novel content creators usually settle on a smaller, more specific viewership (as shown in this article, wherein most of them are listed), but a big YouTuber like BijuuMike could steer even more viewers toward visual novels. This is a great chance for VNs to gain more visibility.
The channel has already reached ten thousand subscribers!
Criticism
In the past, BijuuMike covered games like Totono and Wonderful Everyday while breezing through the dialogue at ridiculous speed, picking out the “interesting” bits. This caused some upset within the visual novel fanbase.
It is understandable that BijuuMike did it this way, however, given the retention rate of viewers on his main channel. Uploading to a second channel will allow him to make longer videos and could help attract more viewers.
His new channel description states:
This is an official Bijuu Mike channel where we ONLY play visual novels and Japanese type games such as Danganronpa, Your turn to die, Katawa shoujo, Ace attorney, and much more! I enjoy playing these types of games and i don’t like the pressure of putting them on my main channel so they will uploaded with no stress here 🙂
This is pretty good news, youtube could use some more VN channels
This is quite nice to see as I myself have started to do Let’s plays on Visual Novels. I really enjoy it myself when I see other people play a Visual novel and see their reactions to certain parts. Lets hope this is going to be positive.