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VNs and Me Today


Clephas

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I've had numerous comments from people who were asking, 'Do you still play VNs?' in the last year or so because I hardly post anymore.   When I do, it is usually litrpg, random commentary, or maybe one game a month.  The short answer is yes.  The full answer is a bit more complicated.

First, I should note that a lot of this is about timing... to be slightly more specific, a confluence of factors that created a singularity of me just not posting anymore.  The events in question are my increasing intolerance for disinteresting themes and pure SOL (that is, slice of life without a central plot, even if it is loose); Coronavirus causing a dramatic drop in the release of non-nukige JVNs; and the resulting tendency I had for going back and replaying stuff I've already posted about in the past (sometimes multiple times).  

While the sheer number of VNs I play per year has gone down from 50-70 to about 20-30, a good portion of those are replays.  I'd say about a little over two-fifths of all the VNs I've played in the last year and a half have been ones I've already replayed multiple times, another fifth were ones I dug out of my archives, another fifth were kusoge not worth posting about, and the remaining fifth are the ones I posted on.  

A contributing factor to this is Coronavirus and the resulting depression in the non-nukige VN market for PC (which I play almost exclusively, since I don't want to mod  my consoles for the sake of VNs alone).  Companies that once put out games multiple times a year have maybe released one in the last year and a half, other companies have quietly gone out of business, and yet other ones had to drop projects because they couldn't work around the health restrictions.  Charage alone have seen an unprecedented decrease in production, with entire months going by with NO releases (something that would have been unthinkable before Coronavirus).  

The last major issue is that my burnout on pure SOL (at least high school SOL) has turned into a complete intolerance.  I once thought it would ease somewhat with time, but, if anything, it has gotten worse.  If there isn't something besides pure SOL in there to catch my interest (like nakige, utsuge, or plotge elements), I simply won't be able to finish them.  

If the protagonist is interesting, I can still (barely) play school life that have something in the way of non-SOL elements, but otherwise, they are unplayable to me.

 

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Really interesting. Well, nukige market is still great, as I can see, releasing ton of games every month on Getchu site (like Appetite, Miel games etc).

But usual eroge market yes... But hey, we still can see a few full-price eroge each month! But I often see now full-price eroge divided separately into one-heroine low-price games (collect whole eroge buying all 3 game packs of something like this). Like Koi-Mitsu from Torte Soft. Uh... 

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