Visual Novels are entirely possible with Visionaire Studio. They are essentially myst-like first person point & click games albeit without the exploration aspect.
You can create branches in any game engine as they rely on the same thing most events do, which is
Conditions. You will need to use a combination of conditions, values & if queries to determine which branch of a story-line the player is on or which event should be played & so on. You could even use Lua tables if you feel up to the challenge.
I've heard of Ren'Py which as far as I'm aware is specifically designed for the creation of Visual Novel games. Never heard of Tyranobuilder.
Yes, you can have animated characters appear over the top of scenes or via an interface. I have been doing some freelance development work on & off for someone who is making an hybrid visual novel / myst-like point & click Sci-Fi game with Visionaire Studio. Check out their website
here - I think there's even a demo for windows & mac available on that site. The freelance I did for them was to create an automated system that would automatically iterate through a conversation on left click & show the correct character sprite / emotion for the currently displayed text rather than them having to manually to create new display text for each one & actions for showing correct animations & hiding the previous ones, etc.