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About this blog

Twitter (for news and announcements)

Steam Curator Page

External Blog

This blog is devoted to popularization (and discussion about) western-produced VNs. My main goal is to present notable non-Japanese visual novels that didn’t receive attention in the Fuwa community and, whenever possible, giving voice to people behind them. Doing this, I hope I’ll be able to give these projects and their creators the appreciation they deserve and oppose some negative stereotypes about non-JP VNs that circulate within our community.

I’m also going to talk about failed VN projects and review newly-released titles of various quality, using this opportunity to discuss the most common flaws and problems characteristic for the western VN development scene and realities of the OELVN market. 

Entries in this blog

Stellaren (mobile-exclusive VN review)

Mobile phones and tablets, especially Android devices, are strangely underutilized as a platform for VN publishing, with few high-profile titles being ported to them (especially when it goes to English versions) and underwhelming selection of dedicated mobile releases. Also, existing Android versions of famous visual novels, such as Narcissu, suffer from technical issues that you wouldn’t expect from what is ultimately a very simple application, based on text and still images. Occasional Ace Att

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

VN Developer Spotlight: Reine Works

For the last few months, I’ve published reviews and top lists, presenting worthwhile or interesting OELVNs that usually have little presence on Fuwa and don’t get discussed as much as they deserve. From the very beginning, however, my goal was to focus not only on the games themselves, but also the people behind them – the independent creators and small studios that make the core of the Western VN market. Today, I present you with the first “Developer Spotlight” post, where I’ll be talking to J

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Moe! Ninja Girls (predatory mobile VN review)

Note: While I didn't plan on tackling Japanese-produced OELVNs on this blog, this title is a perfect representation of mobile game market's business practices implemented in a VN and for this reason was worth a closer look. More than by itself, it's interesting as a negative example of scammy policies that aren't in any way endemic to JP developers and are sadly used by many different companies with various backgrounds. I don’t think many people have any doubts about how horrible the mob

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

One Thousand Lies (free VN review)

As we all know from experience, the formula of visual novel offers various possibilities when it goes to storytelling techniques, making especially the high-budget, Japanese games in the genre much more than just interactive, illustrated books. Still, for most VNs text is unquestionably the core method of delivering the story. This is true especially for the western-developed ones, which rarely can afford high-quality voice acting or animated segments which could occasionally replace written dia

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

12 OELVNs to buy during the Steam Winter Sale

Hello Ladies & Gentlemen! As much as most of us might be completely broke after Christmas, there's still 5 days before the giant seasonal Steam Sale comes to an end and at least until late spring, this is the best opportunity to grab some quality Western VNs on the platform for very little money. Because of this, today I present you with a completely subjective list of 12 OELVNs that you should probably buy while they're unreasonably cheap - you definitely won't regret having them on yo

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Maggot Baits (JP VN Review)

Maggot Baits is something of a Holy Grail of dark eroge, highly anticipated guro fans within the Western VN community and often hyped as possibly the greatest achievement of the company that produced it, Clock Up. As one the most gruesome VNs ever produced, and quite likely the most brutal one ever brought to the West, it contains dozens upon dozens of violent sex scenes, all accompanied by intricate CGs, with small variations in them so numerable that they sum to nearly 2500 unique illustration

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Love Ribbon (yuri VN review)

Incest is not a rare theme in visual novels – many titles, even very serious ones, have romance routes involving protagonist’s sibling in various different configurations, while nukige are full of taboo sex in every conceivable form, including that between family members. Still, this topic is very rarely done in a deep, compelling way, usually leading to a cliché conclusion like “we’re not blood-related after all, we can be together” or simply ignoring the deep social stigma connected to it and

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Carpe Diem: Reboot (failed VN)

Warning: Heavy spoilers ahead! If you want to play this VN yourself, stop reading now. I don’t really recommend playing it though… As much as I’m a fan of independent VNs and appreciate the possibilities that crowdfunding opened for the western visual novel market, it’s not completely rare for these projects to end with spectacular disappointment, for various reasons. Carpe Diem: Reboot is an especially interesting example of a visual novel that ultimately failed to live up to the expectati

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Magical Otoge series (free otome VN review)

The western otome scene offers a decent amount of hidden gems – small, often obscure titles, that nonetheless offer impressive artistic qualities and/or interesting, unique ideas. It also never stops being surprising to me how many of those games are published for free, sometimes even without any Patreon support or other direct forms of monetization on the part of their creators.              Magical Otoge Ciel and Magical Otoge Anholly, developed by Batensan and published for free on

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

VN Developer Spotlight: Nami

Two weeks ago I've brought you an interview with Reine Works' Jackie M., where we talked about realities of OELVN publishing and the specificity of women-oriented western VNs. Today, I have an immense pleasure of bringing the spotlight onto one of my favourite western VN creators. Nami is an indie game developer and author of highly appreciated yuri titles, such as Her Tears Were My Light and Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet. If you observe VN contests such as Yuri Game Jam or NaNoRenO, or you read

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak’s Shovelware Adventures: Yuri Sakura Games, part 2

Hello again and welcome to the second part of our journey through the world of Winged Cloud's yuri shovelware! The release of the Legends of Talia’s was undoubtfully a small disaster for Winged Cloud, not only failing to kickstart the new non-ecchi franchise, but also being quite harshly rejected by WC’s already-existing fanbase. It didn’t, however, end the yurige streak which made the straight Sakura porn, once definitely the dominating format, surprisingly rare in last year and a half

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Shining Song Starnova (Western VN Review)

Love in Space, authors of the highly-appreciated Sunrider series, are a very peculiar kind of EVN developer. In their games, they unapologetically cater to weeaboo sensitivities, copying the Japanese storytelling tropes and stylistics pretty much in every aspect of their games. Sunrider: Liberation Day, the second Sunrider titles was the clearest example of this, with its Japanese speech mannerisms (which look at least a bit questionable in English prose), Japanese voice acting and pompous, Japa

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Sable’s Grimoire (Western VN review + developer interview)

Zetsubou, a developer and writer involved in many popular EVN titles is someone whose work many fans of the genre might be very familiar with, but not necessarily even knowing about it. While have made a few relatively successful projects of his own, such as Sickness or Tomboys Need Love Too!, many of his commissioned works, such as Razzart’s Love Ribbon gained even more recognition. For this reason, among others, there was relatively little fanfare around the release of his latest project, Sabl

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Top 5 Yuri Game Jam VNs (free)

Hello Ladies & Gentlemen! The western visual novel market, unlike the high-budget JP scene, thrives mostly through amateur passion projects and products of small, indie development teams. While this causes most of the Western VNs to be of relatively poor quality, it also promotes creativity and good stylization over huge word-counts and high production values, which are simply unattainable with highly limited budgets and manpower. This philosophy is further supported by various events o

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Starlight Vega (yuri VN review)

Disclaimer: I’m supporting Razz, author of this game, on Patreon and consider myself a fan of much of her work – this might obviously influence the scoring and tone of my review, although I stand by the opinions presented here wholeheartedly. Yuri/shoujo-ai, as much as some of us might enjoy the theme, is still a fairly small niche among Japanese VNs – one that undoubtedly spawned some great titles and has a loyal fanbase, but is nowhere near being a dominant formula in the genre. It’s enou

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Locked Heart (free otome VN review)

Disclaimer: This was the first purely GxB otome game I’ve ever played and my experience was most likely very different from that of a fan of the genre. While I stand by my conclusions, they’re definitely written from an unusual perspective. Locked Heart is a game I’ve encountered pretty much by chance, while randomly browsing VNs available on Google Play. As a nice-looking, free title it quickly found its way into my wishlist, but belonging to a genre I usually don’t play (and apparently fo

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Free Yuri EVNs – non-Yuri Game Jam edition

Welcome back to EVN Chronicles, your prime source of romantic fluff reviews and recommendations! Today, I present you a post that will either capitalize on the post-Valentine's Day atmosphere by providing you even more positive feels, or help mend your lonely heart with quality love stories! Romance, as we all know, is one of the driving elements of visual novels in general, and maybe especially within the niche that is particularly close to my heart – and that is, of course, yuri. Recently, I'v

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

SoulSet (Western VN Review)

Note: I was provided with a free review copy of this game by the developer. All opinions expressed here are solely my own. The multi-route mystery VN is not a format easy to pull off properly and for that reason not many EVN developers even attempt to tackle it. It requires creating a number of paths and characters, all interesting on their own and complementary to each other, while also keeping the overall quality high enough to motivate the reader to go through all of it in order to pi

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

VN Developer Spotlight: ds-sans

In March I've brought you two interviews with notable yuri and otome OELVN developers, talking with Nami and Reine Works' founder, Jackie M. Today, however, we're venturing into the world of very, very traditional romance (with equally high levels of cuteness), as my guest is ds-sans, the author of a lovely freeware VN Sounds of Her Love (be sure to check my review of that game) and the upcoming commercial title Chemically Bonded. I encourage you to join us as we discuss the place of all-ages ro

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

AIRIS (free otome VN review)

Although a significant portion of VNs produced in the West is published for free on platforms such as Steam or Itch.io, most of them are very short and simple projects, often made by starting-out developers or as quickly put-together entries for contents such as Yuri Game Jam. Still, from time to time, it’s possible to find a VNs on a completely different scale also available as free-to-play releases – AIRIS, created by Ebullience Games for NaNoRenO OELVN event and published on April 2017, is de

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

10 OELVNs to buy for <$10 during the Steam Lunar Sale

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen! Just like during the Steam Winter Sale, I offer you a short list of interesting, worthwhile offers on Western-made VNs that popped up for the occasion of Chinese New Year. The Steam market is still a pretty strange place - since forever, some of the best OELVNs available there are absolutely free (honourable mentions in this regard go to Cinderella Phenomenon, Lucid9, One Thousand Lies and CUPID). Thankfully, there's also a lot of interesting, commercial titles t

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Cute Demon Crashers (free nukige[?] review)

Wait… A nukige review? On this anti-porn blog? Well, I should probably start with saying a few things about my view on porn in VNs, to avoid potential misunderstanding – this will be a bit of an essay, so be sure you don’t mind a (small) wall of text not completely related to the game itself. My actual stance on pornography in games is very… Ambivalent. I deal with porn extensively in my university studies, wrote a whole thesis on fan-made erotica and I’m on principle anti-censorship. I’m also v

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

CUPID (free VN review)

In my previous review I was writing about a NaNoRenO OELVN-contest entry that definitely bit slightly more than it could chew – a large scale project that, due to its short development cycle, came out rushed and deeply flawed, not reaching the full potential its premise and characters offered if handled properly. Today, however, I’m dealing with a game that could be seen as a bit of a counter-argument to my thesis on what can and cannot be done within NaNoRenO’s tight timeframe – a visual novel

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Lesbian Visibility Day rant

Hello there! It's not Friday, so it has to be an unusual post and it definitely is one... It will be a bit chaotic too - only now, late in the evening, after taking a day off and pursuing the only lesbian romance route in Tales of Aravorn: Seasons of the Wolf for most of it, I've realized that today is Lesbian Visibility Day. For me, both as a fan of yuri and as an appreciator of OELVNs it probably should be one important holiday - definitely worthy of a few moments/words of reflection.

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

Wolf Tails (western VN review)

Visual novels with the possibility to choose the protagonist’s gender are fairly rare, and genre's focus on storytelling and romance makes such a gimmick especially hard to pull off properly. Creating games like Loren: The Amazon Princess, with an option to choose between two full-fledged leads, one male and one female, each with their own personality and a set of romance options, takes a lot of work and only fits certain kinds of stories. On the other hand, VNs in which gender choice only chang

Plk_Lesiak

Plk_Lesiak

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