Agobarrier, who was the writer of Shuffle (the work most familiar to people here) was one of my favorite non-chuuni VN writers.  Ironically, his best works were all written after leaving Navel and its massive stream of liquid cash to form Rosebleu, my favorite comedy company.  I started going back through his entire library of works (or at least the ones I've played and own) since I heard of his death in mid-April, and as I replay his final work, Valkyrie Runabout, I feel a need to look back on what he did for me, personally (though he obviously had no idea I exist). 

First, for those who don't know what works I'm talking about, the Tiny Dungeon series, which is on the second level of my Beginner recommendations list, is a harem/fantasy/action/comedy based in a multiverse where four worlds, inhabited by four distinct races that just recently ended a horrible inter-world war.  One of the nastier revelations at the end of the war was that it was a human and mostly human interests who had instigated the war's beginning and kept it going through some seriously Machiavellian manipulations.  As a result, the human protagonist, Shirasagi Hime, is a target for prejudice, contempt, and outright hatred regardless of his personal character at Trinity, the school built to encourage peaceful interactions between the three non-human races (humans weren't forbidden from entering the school, but remaining there was kind of... difficult, to say the least).  The series stretches across four games, three of them exploring the possibility of Hime choosing one of the three main heroines (the demon lord Veil, the divine princess Note, or the Queen of the Dragons, Ururu) and the resulting victories and tragedies that result.  The fourth game, Brave or Slave, ties up the series and brings it to a true ending, and Endless Dungeon (the fifth game that serves as a sort of fandisc/extra story) completes the saga.

The Tiny Dungeon series relies on a mix of the various common types of humor found in Japanese VNs in general (manzai, personality-humor, running jokes) and it shows the various eras Agobarrier worked through (from the turn of the century to last year).  In addition, it did what he probably wanted to do with Shuffle... ended things with a harem, lol.

His other works as Rosebleu's jack-of-all-trades (he apparently worked at least a little in every position... and I wouldn't surprised if the COD was overwork, considering this) all shared that sense of humor and maintained a level of quality that reflected his experience in the industry.  The fact is that, setting aside the fact that Rosebleu's games are mid to low-budget affairs, they were all written well and used what they had to its fullest to entertain the reader.

And so I, as one of those who has read every one of his works since he helped found Rosebleu, will soon finish my own period of mourning.  To be honest, his loss hit me almost as hard as the death of David Eddings (one of my favorite authors), and I often find myself purging myself of my grief through the cathartic scenes in his VNs.  I am still young enough to have rarely lost one of the authors I truly fell in love with, so each of them hits me hard...  harder than I really expected, really. 

Edit: My posts on the Tiny Dungeon series

Valkyrie Runabout