UI-related things I'd like to see in (more) visual novels
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Art designed to be displayed at 16:9 or 16:10, or at least a user interface that takes advantage of the extra space provided by widescreen displays. VNs in East Asian languages could place the text vertically in that area, perhaps.
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Vectorized or high-resolution sprites, so that the game can be played at a resolution larger than the typical 800×600.
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In fact, while I’m at it, resizable text.
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A “branch rewind” system that makes it possible to pick some combination of choices and skip straight to the resulting branch, instead of having to use manual saves. Flanca has something like this in its “index” (thanks to @mnxmnkmnd for pointing this out).
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Individual scene replays, which Katawa Shoujo did very well along with the “instant replay” backlog accessible during the game.
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Better keyboard control. Most visual novels provide some keyboard navigation, but it’s almost always incomplete somehow, such as not working for choice selection. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to use the arrow keys and Enter at a minimum. For bonus points, number the choices 1, 2, 3, etc. and make them selectable with the appropriate key. And for the love of God, please document all of the shortcuts somewhere in the manual, or make them configurable. (Just don’t be like the PC version of Remember11, which mapped PS2 buttons onto keyboard keys.)
Any other ideas?