Not much hope for 2015's VN of the Year?
Entry posted by Clephas
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To be honest, the harvest for this year so far has been kind of... less than impressive, to say the least. The best VN I've played this year so far was Silverio Vendetta, and even I think it would have been much better if it had only contained Vendetta's path. I'll come straight out with it and say there aren't any solid candidates so far, even though the year is almost half-over. Last year, by this time, there were four solid candidates - though the later part of the year blew most of them out of the water, and all the candidates from 2013 were concentrated around the beginning of the year.
It is kind of worrying how little in the way of exciting VNs has been released so far this year, and while I am holding out hopes for the new game from Tigre Soft and one or two other possible releases, my experience so far this year is that all the major companies seem to be trying to spit out games that will make them a quick buck for small amounts of effort (fandiscs, shorter games than usual with fewer cgs, using newbie writers, etc). To an extent, that was true last year as well, but it has gotten worse since this year began. For someone who is basically plowing through an average of four or five new VNs every month (or six or seven, like last month), this is not just a minor issue but a real problem. While I found Silverio Vendetta in February to be immensely fun, there really hasn't been anything that blew me out of the water so far.
Understand, this isn't a case of my standards being too high (normally, I would suspect that, but looking at the ones I've played so far objectively...). Rather, it is a case of the bar being lowered overall, by the companies doing the releasing. As an example, Giga released yet another visually impressive but somewhat subpar moe-battle VN near the beginning of the year with an obvious eye toward imitating (poorly) some of Majikoi's more enjoyable aspects, combined with some from the Ikki Tousen anime's concept. Normally, this VN would have been exciting, and it did have all the elements necessary to make a good VN... put together in such a manner that it turned out to be surprisingly bland.
Sanoba Witch, which I had some rather high hopes for, also disappointed me somewhat. For all Yuzusoft's flaws, that company has always tended to understand where the line between serious and joke needs to be drawn in each of its games (ie Dracu-riot). Unfortunately, there was only one path in that game that I could unreservedly praise, and it definitely wasn't kamige material.
Combine that with a poor showing by Minato Soft and barely acceptable works by Pulltop and a few other companies, and I have to wonder exactly what is going on in the eroge business right now.
I know I sound unnecessarily condemnatory, and you would be right to say I'm being pessimistic. However, the fact remains that it hasn't been a good year so far, and six months without a kamige is downright depressing. Of course, you usually can only expect one or two kamige in a given year... but most of the best companies have been producing disappointments, so I think my pessimism is well-deserved, personally.
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