Everything said here is kind of reinforcing what I said, just without the admission that that's what it is.
Otome is Japanese in origin and we don't actually functionally have to call the Western analogues "otome." It's done for convenience more than anything. Beyond the format (visual novel), there's not really anything locked to that.
But you're basically going "the Japanese way is just better." That's the definition of elitism. Others will inevitably have different qualities as cultural differences make their way into scripts. That's the nature of literally everything.
Looking at this the opposite way, dungeon crawling RPGs originated in the West and most of Japan's DRPGs are explicitly influenced by the Wizardry series, which continues to enjoy popularity in Japan. I've literally never seen anyone go "Western DRPGs are just better."
So yeah, as I said, it comes down to a combination of elitism and being unwilling to engage with anything that doesn't follow a set of tropes that are established by the genre. You can see the same thing in the manga/anime community. There's this whole debate about "powerscalers" that's ongoing.
I think you're flattening two separate things into "elitism" when they aren't necessarily the same.
Nobody said Western VNs are incapable of being well-written. What people are saying is that otome, as a genre identity, developed within a specific Japanese storytelling framework, so naturally many players associate the genre with those conventions; that's not unusual or unique to otome at all.
Otome is not merely "a visual novel with romance," It emerged from a very specific Japanese media ecosystem with its own pacing, emotional language, character archetypes, aesthetic priorities, and relationship dynamics.
So when people say they prefer Japanese otome, they're often responding to those embedded conventions, not making a statement that "Japan is superior."
The Wizardry comparison doesn't fully work because DRPG mechanics are much more structurally transferable than romance storytelling even can. A dungeon crawler can preserve its gameplay loop regardless of cultural context - but otome
heavily depends on atmosphere/subtext, interpersonal restraint and tone management.
It's similar to how people distinguish between Hollywood romcoms, K-dramas, Turkish dramas, or Bollywood romance despite all technically being "
romance." Nobody calls it elitist when someone says they prefer K-drama pacing or Japanese horror over Western horror because they're recognizing different cultural storytelling traditions.
I also think you're reading "
this immerses me more" as "
this is objectively better," when those aren't equivalent statements: people gravitate toward genres partly because they want certain conventions fulfilled. That's true of literally
every niche media community.
TBH, the fact that people still specifically say "
Western otome" already suggests the term carries a recognizable Japanese-derived identity beyond simply "a romance VN," otherwise the qualifier wouldn't even be necessary.
If the game did not claim it's an otome game, then, and stated it's a romance VN - people wouldn't be dissatisfied with the expectation the term placed.
