Company type | Brand of Aquaplus |
---|---|
Industry | Computer games |
Genre | Eroge & visual novels |
Founded |
Osaka, Japan (1995 ) |
Headquarters | , Japan |
Area served | Japan |
Key people | Naoya Shimokawa |
Products | |
Website |
leaf |
Leaf is a Japanese visual novel studio under the publisher Aquaplus, and has offices in Yodogawa-ku, Osaka, and Tokyo. It and its competitor Key (to which it is often compared) are two of the most popular and successful dedicated visual novel studios operating today.[ citation needed] It was launched out of obscurity by its early release To Heart.[ citation needed] Leaf used the XviD video codec in several games: Aruru to Asobo!!, Tears to Tiara, Kusari, and ToHeart2 X Rated. Since XviD is free software, released under the GPL, Leaf was obligated to release the source code to those games under the same license. [1] [2] [3] One still requires the game data to actually play the games with the source code. [4] [5] In addition, a free software game engine, named xlvns, was developed soon after Leaf released its first three visual novels. [6] [7] Characters from Utawarerumono, Tears to Tiara, To Heart, and Kizuato are playable in Aquapazza: Aquaplus Dream Match, a fighting game developed by Aquaplus featuring characters from various Leaf games. [8]