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About this blog

This is a blog primarily focusing on but not limited to VNs.  It is primarily designed to express my opinion on otaku media (jrpgs, anime, manga, LNs, VNs, etc), individual VNs, and otaku community issues.   Most of the posts are related to my VN of the Month and Random VN columns, originally started in threads in the forums. 

As of March of 2017, I'm also looking for people to help with VN of the Month.

Entries in this blog

Iinkai no Antihero ~IINCHO-Re.co~

Ok, I know some of you are going to wonder why I bothered with this game.  As the remake of Iinchou wa Shounin-sezu, this game exists as a reboot of a game that wasn't interesting in the first place.  So, why did I decide to play this, despite having stopped VN of the Month?  Pure perversity and contrariness, probably. The big problem with this game, saying it outright from the first, is that it uses a style that has more or less vanished due to its massive unpopularity with the target audi

Clephas

Clephas

VN of the Month June 2017 update

This is an update of the play status of June's releases. Ai yori Aoi Umi no Hate- On hiatus/stalled for the moment due to gaming exhaustion.  Plan to resume by the tenth. Haruoto Alice * Gram - Planned for play after Aiao.  Pure Song Garden! - Currently being played by Dergonu. Tantei Seven- Dropped and labeled a kusoge by fun2novel, our resident mystery VN lover.  No plans to include it in the contest.

Clephas

Clephas

Studio Ryokucha

Since I decided to go back and play two of their old games, I thought I'd explain my experiences with this company. Studio Ryokucha, like many older charage/moege companies, tends to produce two types of games... the standard 'empty candy' charage where there is no central plot to deal with, and the 'candy with filling' type, where there is a central story/plot that serves as the backbone of the game.   To be blunt, their 'empty candy' charage are second-rate at best, due to their tendency

Clephas

Clephas

Random VN: Shukusei no Girlfriend

Shukusei no Girlfriend is the first of three games in the series, based in a world where mahou shoujo-like girls calling themselves Stars fight demons to protect humanity... a pretty standard setting that, in most games, would mean lots of tentacles, aku-ochi, and general mayhem that would range from the mildly distasteful to the outright disgusting.  While in anime (non-hentai) most mahou shoujo are fairly straightforward and rigidly formulaic battle anime, in VNs, mahou shoujo usually end up o

Clephas

Clephas

Akatsuki Works and Applique release free mini-VNs

Akatsuki Works and Applique, two subsidiaries of Akabeisoft2 (of Sharin no Kuni and G-Senjou no Maou fame) have each released a mini-VN for free on their websites (which are a pain to access from outside of Japan, but anyone used to bypassing DMM's controls on their MMO releases should be able to manage it).  Akatsuki Works released Hi no Nai Tokoro ni Kemuri wa Tatanai  ( https://vndb.org/v19369  ), which seems to be a chuunige-type by Hino Wataru, as is typical of the Akatsuki Works brand.  Ap

Clephas

Clephas

Random VN: Soukyuu no Soleil

Soukyuu no Soleil stands out a bit amongst the others in the series so far, in that it is based in a world far more obviously in trouble than either of the first two games or the later games.  The main problem in the world of Soukyuu no Soleil is that all use of magic drains life from the planet itself (as opposed to the user's lifespan in Shirogane).  In that world, most of the nations of the world got fixated on using magic to defeat one another... and as a result, much of the world was destro

Clephas

Clephas

Litrpg series I've liked so far

I have only recently 'discovered' the litrpg genre (for those unfamiliar with this, the most similar examples I can give are Overlord, SAO, and Log Horizon) of novels.  As such, I'm not going to presume to review things like stat systems and how the stories 'played'.  It would be ridiculous for me to do so (since I'm not a min-max freak who loves all that math), and it would also be boring as hell to listen to here, lol.  I will note some classic tropes:  Protagonists who jump to wrong conclusio

Clephas

Clephas

Random VN: Ryuukishi Bloody Saga

Ryuukishi Bloody Saga might very well be the best unique work Akabei Soft 3 has created in the time since ABS2 forced a bunch of subsidiaries to merge to create it.  It is a work I also come back to every few years simply because it holds a unique place in my heart.   Ryuukishi is the sequel to Ryakudatsusha no In'en, a Clock-up style super-violent H-horror VN written expressly for the purpose of setting up things for Ryuukishi.  As such, to understand this VN, you have to understand the ev

Clephas

Clephas in VNs

Shiranui's Journey (Evolimit): The Tale of a Hero

Be warned, this is full of spoilers for one of my favorite VNs, Evolimit.  Shiranui Yoshikazu is one of my favorite protagonists of all time, and I thought it would be good to just lay out why I loved the guy from beginning to end.           Shiranui's past   The Disaster (MAJOR Spoilers.  Don't read this part unless you have finished at least Kazuna's ending) Even entirely ignoring the events of the main story, Shiranui's story is one of quiet he

Clephas

Clephas

Magical Dears Part1: Some complaints and some compliments

Magical Dears is the newest VN by one of Navel's subordinate companies, Navel Honeybell... and to be honest, I was interested to see what they would do with it.  The VN itself is your standard slice-of-life charage based in an alternate Earth where magicians have been working behind the scenes to save the world since the dawn of civilization.  In this world, the magicians revealed themselves when they realized that intervening behind the scenes to prevent disasters had already reached its limit

Clephas

Clephas

Getting back into VNs after time away

For most people who play VNs, taking a break is a normal thing.  Even taking a hiatus of a few months or a year seems to be standard for many in our little community. For ten years, for me, it wasn't. My new addiction to litrpgs succeeded in breaking me of my compulsive VN-reading for the first time in a decade.  While some might consider this a bad thing (and have told me so), others have said that it was a good one.  Personally, as I've started playing Purple Soft's latest game, Seis

Clephas

Clephas

June Release Issues

I'm going to be blunt... I won't be playing any more of June's releases for a while.  My reasons?  I have several. 1)  My phys copy of Haruoto isn't set to arrive until mid-September, so I can't play it right now. 2)  Aiao keeps pressing my pet peeves, but I'm feeling more irritable than I really should, indicating that I simply won't be able to rate it fairly.   Problems with Aiao I've mentioned this in the past, but I intensely dislike pop culture and the entertainment busi

Clephas

Clephas

What makes a great VN battle scene?

I had someone ask me why I consider some VN battle scenes to be good and others to be low quality just the other day, and I thought I would address this here.   First, I should state that while visuals definitely have an effect on the quality of a battle scene, the quality of visuals is less than 15% of the reasons why I pick one VN's battle scenes over another's.  The considerations when it comes to visuals are raw quality (artist skill, detail, etc), number of combat-related CGs and sprit

Clephas

Clephas

Random VNs: Shukufuku no Kane no Oto wa, Sakurairo no Kaze to Tomo ni

For those who are wondering about jury duty: I got rejected inside ten minutes without an explanation, lol.  Moreover, I spent four days reversing my sleep schedule so I wouldn't be groggy and zombified... what a waste of effort. Anyway, I finished playing Shukufuku no Kane last night but didn't have the time to post on it, given how I needed to go to bed eight hours earlier than my usual time.  This is the second time I played this game,, and I had to shift the vote upward in response to m

Clephas

Clephas

Toxic Tropes: The Childhood Promise, the easygoing osananajimi relationship

I decided to start a series covering certain tropes I consider to be generally toxic for various reasons.  These tropes are not character archetypes (which I will probably make a different series of posts about later), just to let you know. This time, I want to cover the childhood promise, and easygoing relationships with osananajimi heroines. The Childhood Promise Perhaps one of the most prolifically used tropes in charage in particular and VNs in general, the childhood promise i

Clephas

Clephas

litrpg author: William D. Arand

The Litrpg genre has a bunch of subsets, from the gamelit (characters are actually in a game) and portal fantasy  (go through a portal to a game-like world) to Wuxia/xanxia style cultivation and anime-style harem setups. William D Arand is an interesting writer...  He is definitely on the harem side of things, because all of his protagonists end up with a harem of women who are both devoted to him and end up running his life, as well as being deadly, amoral and more than a little crazy.  Mo

Clephas

Clephas

Magical Dears Final: Good god, this is crap.

Yes, I'm going to say it right here and now... this is a kusoge.  Oh, there are some good points...but unfortunately, the really half-assed way things are done between and after the most vital points kind of make this VN the crap it is. First, this VN as a whole suffers from the 'didn't go far enough' and 'not enough detail' syndromes.  Even the romantic elements in this VN feel truncated, and that is usually the only story element in which charage excel.  Why do I say 'didn't go far enough'?  I

Clephas

Clephas

2nd Experimental Book Post: Honor Harrington

First, I should mention that I'm a huge fan of David Weber.  Even his crappiest book is still interesting to read (the crappiest book being Out of the Dark, an Independence Day-style story where the world is saved by Dracula, lol).  However, the Honor Harrington series is my favorite series written by him. Beginning with On Basilisk Station, this military sci-fi series begins focused on the character known as - obviously - Honor Harrington, a young warship captain getting command of a new l

Clephas

Clephas

Random Translation: Devils Devel Concept Opening scene

(The first few lines of this can't be hooked, and I've never had the scripts extracted, so forgive me for not presenting the Japanese for them) Half of this world is made up of 'evil'.  'Evil' is desire. That which humans spill out as easily as breathing. (Clephas: combination of two lines, due to this VN being NVL style, it is often necessary to translate multiple lines together) That is an unseen crystallization of people's emotions. That is desire. That is 'evil'

Clephas

Clephas

Random VN: Duelist x Engage

Duelist Engage is one of a number of VNs I was pretty sure I underrated relative to my time doing VN of the Month.  The fact that the VN stuck in my mind even almost a decade later says that this supposition was most likely correct.  Thankfully, after replaying it (after so long it was mostly new to me) I found that this supposition was correct. Before I dig into story and character issues, I need to note that one way this VN stands out over modern charage is the expressiveness of the heroi

Clephas

Clephas in VNs

Kodomo no Asobi Part 2: Yuzuriha (moving onto Hatsuru)

I went ahead and did Yuzuriha's path, since it and Sera's branch off from one another.  Despite this fact, Yuzuriha's path is quite distinct from Sera's, so you don't need to worry about all of the text repeating or anything like that.  Yuzuriha's path does have one thing in common with Sera's though... and that is that the relation formation stage is pretty long.  In both cases, there is a lot of back and forth, chasing and being chased, and if you have trouble with that, this path might be a b

Clephas

Clephas

Sora no Tsukurikata part three: Third Arc and Noa

The third arc of this story focuses on the homonculus, Noa. Noa is a homonculus made by an old alchemist named Kagari, who dwells atop the hill overlooking the city.  She is the game's resident loli, a sweet, slow-speaking, kind-hearted girl who raises vegetables as something of a cross between her lifework and a hobby.  Naturally, like most characters of her type, she is widely loved by the game's characters. The third arc and Noa's path pursue knowledge of Noa's past, her nature as a

Clephas

Clephas

JRPG: Saga Frontier Remastered

Saga Frontier is one of the most oddball rpgs to have been released on the ps1, and the ps1 was long considered the 'era of classics' for all jrpg-dom, with remakes of the earlier major names and innumerable newer classics being released for the system.  The Saga series in general is something of an acquired taste, due to the sheer opaqueness of the leveling mechanics and odd, often nonsensical experimentation with random game elements.   In terms of game mechanics, Saga Frontier is easily

Clephas

Clephas in JRPG

Random VN: Lineup

I went ahead and based my schedule on the poll's numbers...  1: Silverio Vendetta (because I need some chuuni) 2: Houkago no Futekikakusha 3:  Dracu-riot (Japanese version) This is subject to change based on what is going on and sales (I keep an eye out for cheap games on download, lol), but for now, this is the schedule.  I am also going to play Kouya (started yesterday as withdrawal reached its peak).  Sorry, as I said before, I ignored that poll.  Jeanne would take too muc

Clephas

Clephas

VN of the Month Updates

For March's VN of the Month fun2novel has finished etatoto and will be sending me his review at some point in the near future.  Dergonu is currently playing Akumade, Kore wa ~ no Monogatari, though the current date he will be finishing it is unknown.  When I have their reviews for these two VNs, I will announce the VN of the Month for March. For April's releases I've currently completed three VNs from this month.  Koneko, Maou to Yuusha, and Tenpure.  Only Maou to Yuusha, of the

Clephas

Clephas

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