Over the weekend, news broke that Yorhel, founder of the popular Visual Novel Database (VNDB) website, had passed away. Let’s look at the life of this amazing man in this blog post!
Who Was Yorhel?
On Saturday, Twitter lit up with news that Yorhel (real name Yoran Heling) had passed away. He died on March 17, but the news was announced over the weekend.
Yorhel was a Dutch man who studied electrical engineering at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the Netherlands. He discovered visual novels and became especially enamoured with Ever 17: The Out of Infinity [Steam link]. But when he went to find useful information about this unique genre from Japan, he was surprised to find almost nothing in English. So he created the ultimate resource for fans of visual novels, which would become VNDB [site link].
The Influence of VNDB
VNDB — the Visual Novel Database — was created in September 2007. It was the perfect otaku story. A Dutch developer played a Japanese sci-fi mystery visual novel and wanted to find more info on the game, only to find that the English-speaking internet had almost nothing to offer. Rather than giving up, he built the resource he wished had existed. At the time, most visual novel information was available only in Japanese, with scattered communities such as the old JAST USA forums, the Newgrounds BBS, or Something Awful, none of which were reliable places to find information. This made the VN fandom very hard for fans outside Japan to approach.
From those humble beginnings, VNDB grew into something remarkable. Within a year, the database had cataloged over 1,000 visual novels. By 2019, that number had surpassed 24,000. As of late 2025, VNDB catalogs over 58,000 visual novels, all maintained by a passionate community of users.
The scope of what VNDB documents goes well beyond simple title listings. Entries cover staff credits, including programmers and voice cast, character breakdowns, average game length, commercial availability, and community rankings. It tracks fan translations alongside official releases, documents eroge and mainstream titles alike without judgment, and provides a public API that developers have used to build recommendation engines and tracking tools.
For localization companies like JAST USA, the VNDB site was invaluable. I used it many times to get information on games we were considering licensing or actively working on. It was also a great way to find the definitive English name for a character in a VN, to avoid accidentally picking a spelling that would rub fans the wrong way.
Kana Okari is the remake of one of Japan’s most legendary VNs ever. Read about it here!
Before He Died, Yorhel Realized his Dream of Visiting Japan
We all share a collective fascination with Japan, and Yorhel was no exception. So I was super happy to find that he visited Japan before his passing. His Mastodon account has many photos he posted of beautiful Japanese shrines and random encounters with Japanese men in the middle of a rice field. It’s a good reminder that if you haven’t visited Japan yet, you should probably start making plans, since none of us knows what’s around the corner.
Thanks for reading this blog post exploring the life of Yorhel, a man who made a great contribution to visual novel culture through his VNDB website. When did you discover the site, and how has it helped you get into the VN fandom?
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