I’m fine with keeping honorifics, especially when a change in honorific use is a notable part of the story (such as when characters become closer and start referring to each other more casually) or when characters have lines like “drop the -san.” Those things don’t work very well when translated directly to English because they rely heavily on a cultural aspect that doesn’t really exist in English.
I’ve noticed a lot in games and anime where the feeling that I get from hearing how a character is referred to and the feeling I get from reading how it was translated are two very different feelings. Sometimes they’ll remove honorifics altogether and you lose out on that information about their relationship. Sometimes they try to “translate” the honorifics and instead give a completely different impression of the characters and their relationships.
I think the most important thing in a translation is preserving the intended meaning… not of the words themselves but what those words are actually trying to convey. If you can do that with English equivalents? Great! If not, I’d rather the book require more cultural knowledge to understand than insist on scrubbing out anything that can’t be translated directly.
For a native English speaker reading translated visual novels (VNs), I’m not really sure if the benefits would be comparable to reading more long form text like an actual novel.
That said, VNs are often brought up as a really good option for people studying Japanese to practice reading. It’s a nice middle option between manga, which is 90% pictures with 10% dialogue, and novels, which give you no additional context to help you figure out what a text is saying. They also vary in difficulty depending on the game. Some are only dialogue, while others are full of descriptive text (there’s even some that will cover the entire screen with text lmao). I think for a Japanese learner, VNs provide a lot of benefits when it comes to improving your reading skills.
But that’s reading native content. Translated VNs tend to have a lot of errors and awkward language even when translated professionally.
There are VNs produced in English (often called OELVNs), and those might be a valuable resource for people who struggle to read English. Whether or not you can gain anything more than entertainment from it just depends on your current skill level imo.