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So I finally made to 1000 posts...none of you care, but I'm still gonna make this post for the percentage of you that will look at this post. I arrived here in early October. October 12th to be exact and it took me a while to adapt to this community. Once that happened, I spammed my way to 500 posts on January 27th. By that point, I really only talked to people in the chat at that point and sometimes with people in PMs and the forums and now, I've talked to a lot of you in some way. I've had a lot of fun in these forums because of the people I will be mentioning later on and will continue to have fun in the future. This site has changed me in some way. Before these forums, I didn't have any motivation to learn Japanese and was a complete vanilla fag and after a few months here, I am very slowly on my way to learning Japanese (I blame school and/or my laziness) and am now enjoying rape hentai. Now before some of you call the cops on me for saying that, I will now thank some people that I feel deserve mentioning. Also, I will be mentioning some people more than once and yes, you are free to make multiple yaoi fanfics about it @mitchhamilton. First of all, my spam chat group that started as a plan to spam Fuwanovel with @Dergonu and @CeruleanGamer quickly became a place to chat. I usually spend most of my time in these forums there because of some of the people who are regulars. Those regulars are @Arcadeotic, @DarkZedge, @Nashetania, @Kiriririri, @Kawasumi, and @TexasDice and then there are the people who show up once in a while like @Deep Blue, @XReaper, @Canicheslayer, @Funyarinpa, @Vorathiel, and @Okarin. You guys have made the chat fun to participate in even if you spam way too much to keep up with all the posts. We also added @Kaguya and @Clephas recently and hopefully you guys will post often. Now for the mod team @Nosebleed, @Down, @Kaguya, @Eclipsed, @Zenophilious, @Flutterz, and @Kurisu-Chan. You guys have done a great job keeping these forums in check and I hope you continue doing that. I've talked with some of you on occasion in the Phase PM group so I don't know you as well as I could but I hope to talk with you a lot more now that I've actually started talking to people on this site. Here's to @Kaguya winning the mod war and I'm not sorry for stealing borrowing your gimmick @Kurisu-Chan. Next, the VNTL crew of @Tay, @Decay, and @Zakamutt. I've been reading VNTL since April and I've enjoyed all the posts you make on them. I've barely talked to any of you and I hope to in the near future as long as @Nosebleed doesn't break the forums again. #blameNosebleed And finally, for the chat group of @greenshadow622, @Velociraptor, @Flutterz, @Ayana, @gijimu, and I can't currently remember the rest so if I forgot you, I don't care. Obvious sarcasm aside, you guys have made the chat fun to be in. I enjoyed all those pointless discussions about our masturbation habits and politics. And with that, my post is complete. Again, thank you for making these forums fun for me and I hope to have a lot more fun in the future.

people are actually wondering why maitetsu? Did you see how many bought the all ages nekopara versions lol. And nekopara actually leads me to what I wanted to talk about, PRODUCTION VALUE. Maitetsu has A LOT of it, including animated sprites even in the CGs (you cant deny that when you talk about vns, then this actually counts as something "out of the ordinary"), the game engine they use is solid as hell.

Licensing a definitive loli-ge from an acclaimed developer of lolicon games--to then censor the lolis--is perhaps Dovac's finest moment. He managed to troll lolicons, SJWs, and amaze and confuse the VN community all in one fell swoop. While no one can quite imagine what twisted mind could possibly conceive that this was a good idea, all can agree that this moment will go down in history as the moment that the VN community met terrorism--and its face was Dovac.

Hey everyone! Fantastic news from the Aokana TL front! The private Facebook group has been working extremely hard to release the game for all of you, and I just wanted to update all of you on their progress: A common route on April 20th of 2016 in 5 different languages? Look forward to it! If you'd like to read the game early, feel free to support this amazing group. In addition, the project leader (who was very upset about seeing the project sold to Sekai Project and seemed to fuel his project out of pure hatred for the one I was running) plans to pitch their TL to sprite: Good luck guys, and see you on the TL scene!

I do have other things to invest my time into like masturbation and hentai and I see what you mean now.

Chikan (public molestation) is an integral part of Japanese train culture.

Ok, I'm back in the land of the living after a very late night. So a few comments: Seriously, there were a lot of people chuckling at me about the Maitetsu question. I saw the lolis and kind of knew what I was signing up for, but I wasn't quite aware of the extent of the H content and quite how young the characters looked. Anyway, I actually just tweeted at dovac about that question and got an interesting response: "We had internal discussions about this, but just can't talk about it at this time." This is very much in line with how I interpret their response last night: it wasn't a denial, or even a hinted denial, of any kind of 18+ release. It was an extremely neutral question dodge. I really don't know what to expect - if it were already decided to be something as simple as "there will be no H content", I don't think they would be responding the way they are. My guess is that it's still an in-progress discussion, both with the developer and internally, trying to figure out what kind of balance they should tread to maintain their reputation with all camps and to make the release have the maximum positive impact. None of us is in a position to predict the future here - let's wait and see what happens. Regardless, I actually don't care - I almost certainly will play Maitetsu, because the idea is cute, the art looks freaking gorgeous, and I have no problem with the occasional moege (I seriously love IMHHW, censorship, bad translation, and all). And when I do play Maitetsu, you can bet I'm going to play that censored Steam release. I don't know why people are talking about Kickstarters WRT the SP announcements. They said absolutely nothing about it at SakuraCon, and I don't think they said anything about Kickstarter at Anime Boston either. Each time they announce something is going through Kickstarter, it's been announced as having a Kickstarter from the beginning, right? I think there's clearly not going to be one for any of this stuff. Will SP get a little less incomprehensible hate about Kickstarter after this? Probably not. I am pretty hyped about Ley Line. It's good to see SP had another solid announcement up their sleeve for Boston and didn't dump everything at SakuraCon. I'm actually really happy about the recent pattern of fan translation projects turning into officially-licensed releases. Fan translators deserve compensation for their work, and as a significant and growing group of fans, we deserve to be taken seriously by the original developers and publishers. This new trend, and the very clear rapid growth of the US VN-reading market over the last couple years, are very positive signs. MangaGamer, I am disappoint. But you're releasing Tokyo Babel in the next week, so you know what, actually we're totally square. I have a fair bit of faith in their recent product decisions, so I'm sure they'll come back swinging next time.

It went really well! I was going to post last night, but, well... Anyway, I was up so late that despite not getting anywhere near enough sleep, I just now got settled in front of a computer again briefly (before, of course, heading back to the con shortly). My biggest fear was that nobody would show up, but the opposite happened: the crowd was so big that people had to be turned away at the door! So that's a little sad, but on the other hand, I had a big, interested group of people. Also, apparently they had a projector malfunction in that room and no replacement, so my slides were up on a depressingly tiny 32" TV screen. Thankfully the room wasn't that big, so people were able to read the large text of my slides (which I'm quite certain of because the whole room was laughing at both the second Steam slide and the Steins;Gate slide well before I said anything). But I think the game screenshots were probably illegible, so things like my Grisaia Somalia reference and my closing joke didn't play as well as they should have. The presentation itself went off really well - by my own lights, I did better on each topic than I did in any of my rehearsals. I must've talked at light speed, though, since I was apparently done in ~30 minutes... but whatever, people didn't seem to mind. I did the eye contact thing; it clearly worked. The Q&A section went for about 10 minutes, and revealed a pretty diverse crowd: I had a passionate otome fan who had played pretty much everything she could get her hands on and was looking for new stuff. She was mostly interested in the importing + fan TL side of things, and we had a little chat after the panel was over. I mentioned that I'd been planning to pick up Hakuoki soon, and her eyes lit up. I had another female who had a friend that was trying to get her into VNs, but only knew about JList, and she was loth to spend $80 and wait a month to play something. So, she was very happy to hear about all the more affordable options I'd laid out. I had a /r/visualnovels redditor who helped me out with a couple additional pointers about the reddit VN community, and who grilled me about my basis for believing the Grisaia translation to be better-written than the original Japanese (my answer: I can understand a lot of the original dialog, and it's clearly not as colorful as koestl's translation) I had the three people who, for the last few years, had been hosting a kind of "what are visual novels" panel at SakuraCon. I actually ran into them early at the Sekai Project line and asked why they weren't running the panel this year, and the main guy said "I forgot about the deadline. But it looks like somebody else is doing a panel, so I guess it worked out ok". That of course elicited a chuckle and a "That's me". They were quite helpful, especially in fielding some audience questions - clearly a lot more experienced than I am. I was chatting briefly before the panel with the SakuraCon volunteer who was running ops for my panel; when I mentioned I was running the only visual novel fan panel at SakuraCon, it turned out that he had no idea visual novels existed, and assumed that I was using some weird name for graphic novels. He got into it enough that he asked a question during the Q&A session too All told, the room was at capacity with 25 attendees. I had two people leave near the end (maybe they had somewhere to be at 11; still hurts a bit), but the rest of the crowd seemed really into it, sticking around all the way through the end of the Q&A, and I got a couple big rounds of applause. I walked out in company with the friend I'd brought along (who had never played more than a little bit of F/SN before deciding it wasn't for him, but who I apparently completely sold on picking up Grisaia; I really thought Comyu would be more his speed since he loves mecha...), as well as the past-year panelists and a few other random people, all of whom were chatting about ancient VN lore I knew nothing about. It was a great vibe, and I'm really happy that, even if those people didn't get anything from my presentation directly, I provided a venue for them to meet up and chat. So, yeah, it was an absolute blast, and I definitely achieved my goal of bringing knowledge to a few more people and helping the community grow a little bit.

I would've vastly prefered Otoboku2 over Imopara

I feel good about my inability to get emotionally invested in pre-release games. I've got literally nothing riding on this. You should probably start lowering your expectations. Give Apathy A Try.

Fred stepped up for us! Never forget his sacrifice!

Truly memorable, and I'm glad I stayed glued to the computer for the entire thing (this isn't true, I had better things to do.) Jesus, my backlog is going to grow exponentially when all these get released (once again, this is a piece of fiction.) My heart is going boom-didi-boom-didi-boom (it's barely beating at all.)

>MaiTetsu >MAITETSU Boys, brace yourselves because this shit is extremely ヤバイ (linking the nsfw version of this pic would land people in jail)

Thanks, based SP. They knew what we really wanted, in the deepest recesses of our hearts, and they delivered. I don't know how it's possible, but they actually disappointed me even more than I was expecting, and I was expecting crap.

Maybe I should try matchmaking too

I wasn't mentioned twice. 0/10 post. Congrats on 1k posts V. It's been a blast getting to know you and talking with you Here is to another 1k posts! So see you in a week! (You filthy spammer )

I do not exist.

Actually talking about Ley Line for a bit, the first game's translation has been practically in a finished state for pretty much a year now. I'd be surprised if it takes longer than a month or two from this point to make it onto Steam. What's left to be done with it? They also started progress on the sequel before they stopped tracking progress entirely, and by this point that may be almost done as well? Hopefully we actually see a fast release schedule for this series. And congrats to Kohaku for actually managing to get paid for this. ~~~ Gonna bump the thread to talk and speculate about the next major convention MangaGamer is attending, Anime Central. According to MangaGamer's announcements page, they've already slotted in two announcements, including a VN from a new partner. Since I was so good at predicting ImoPara 2 (what an amazing prophet I am), I will now bestow upon you all my next prediction: Watashi ga Suki nara "Suki" tte Itte! from ChuableSoft. Remember last July when the president of ChuableSoft was engaging english fans on twitter, asking us what we'd like to see from them? And we basically got him to get in touch with the major VN publishers here? Basically, I'd be surprised if nothing ever came of that, and it's about time for an announcement to be made. I suspect that it may be MG's new partner announcement at Anime Central. Let's wait and see. edit: Or I guess I'm NOT going to bump this thread. Thanks for nothing, nazi mods.

The thing that separate Lose and Galette is that Lose gives their games a proper plot rather than just straight out nukige

I guess the only two releases worth mentioning of both companies are ImoPara 2 and Maitetsu. I'm fine with ImoPara2 since it's more than I would have expected from such a small con, especially considering what rubbish MG 'could' have announced. Sekai Project seems to have gotten inspired by Jast's Starless and do the same with Maitetsu just with lolis instead of fetish content. It's fascinating to see how our precious English VN publishers manage to always pick the most outrages titles between hundreds and thousands of other top VN's that would be perfectly save. Anyway, I'm not into loliges so I can fortunately follow the whole affair with a bemused smile.

In this week's VNTS, I touch upon the social issue Maitetsu will face with Steam. Mainly, I wonder how many people will be afraid to buy and play Maitetsu on Steam purely out of shame? Another one of the problems this industry will end up running into with Steam is the inability to be discrete in the system, unless you choose to block yourself off from the community and your friends entirely. I guess people could always buy a secondary account for this purpose, but when you start introducing hurdles like that, you start bleeding potential customers. They'll start feeling like they're doing something wrong, having to have a secondary account no one knows about, and will stop themselves. It's a complex psychological and sociological issue, to be sure.

For Pulltop games you need to set your time and date format to Japanese as well.

Are these announcements even need to be at panels? Why can't they just announce it at their website and stop trolling people?

With the amount of people commenting on my voice, I'm starting to think maybe I missed my true calling as a radio personality.

Some more Q&A Q: Now that Zero Escape series is coming to an end, what do you as a creator want to do next? A: With Zero Time Dilemma we changed to a more cinematic method of storytelling and the honest reason is people don’t like reading. Cinematics are much more direct and it’s much easier to keep people invested in a story. While adventure game genre has a lot going for it, it also has a high barrier of entry. ~~ Fk people that don't like reading

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0K1qpObGjoT

Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines yesterday; what happened to this AI is really pretty much identical to letting 4chan raise a child.

Team Down-but-not-out: we collectively killed ... something that wasn't even a person? Oh come on.

Curse random Dota matchmaking. But seriously what's the odds?

You think too much. And I'm not that much of a pls HD graphics n' fully voiced whippersnapper >:c

That's not how DotA works I told Fluttez that I quit with DotA and that I would never play it again... and here we are.

You've wrote that really beautifully. Ach, what a great vn it is.

This is actually how it was meant to be, and why it's kinda sweet in a tragic way super S;G spoilers!! Beware!@#

EDIT: Second game, I got randomly matched-up with Li again.

Confession: Today, I got randomly matched-up with a Fuwanovel member in DotA match (the match is still on-going).

omg, that's so true, what the hell happened to our favorite Rain x Cyr Cyr last log was Feb 23, RIP, prob busy w. the 3D world and Rains is actually still active 'round the forums, so it just means he ditched this thread too-cool-4-you-scrubs style

ImoPara 2 was the announcement I was most disappointed in. I was hoping for Otoboku 2

Uhhh...why? They're still making the 18+ version. That's all I care about. Shaming them for trying to reach out to a bigger audience is stupid. Some people will only buy all-ages versions, or are too lazy to buy games off of Steam, and there's no real reason to not put it up on there.

Let's not spill more salt than needed... They were just first announcements, gotta wait for AExpo/Otakon to get some proper ones. Time to sleep... And dream, definitely not about announcements.

All-ages only version basically confirmed. RIP.

Oh, you just mentioned the most popular anime which are based on visual novels. Now try saying good things about the other 450, too.

Report #TeamDown for feeding

I talked briefly with both the MangaGamer and Sekai Project booth staff today, and managed to get one interesting tidbit out of a MG person: when I asked about a Gahkthun physical release, he said "not yet", with a very strong emphasis on the yet. So, it seems like that's being worked on. They had a bit of Gahkthun merch hanging around - a towel featuring the Neon swimsuit CG was admittedly somewhat tantalizing, but is nonetheless not my thing. However, I couldn't resist picking up the Gahkthun drama CD they were selling; my spoken Japanese comprehension is getting good enough to where I should be able to get something out of it. Seriously, though, I am getting really annoyed with MG's marketing. First, they bring in a sweet romance title like Kindred Spirits on the Roof. Then, on the marketing side they take this sweet romance story and spin it as pure sex: "#yuritopia" was about all they ever posted about it on Twitter. So I ask the booth staffer about it today in an open-ended way, leading with "I hear that's pretty good". I even had the decency to tell them beforehand that I really like Gahtkhun and am not interested much in their nukige, hoping for just a small nod towards quality story/writing/whatever. The MG booth staffer's response: "Yeah, it's got gay ghosts!" He then tries to sell it to a few random passers-by, yelling "lesbian ghosts!" No takers. Shocking. Anyway, just a couple more hours until the SakuraCon Sekai Project panel now. I'm curious if they're going to dump all the announcements here, or if they'll split with Anime Boston tomorrow; if they split, I expect they'll save their best one for the second day, so it's entirely likely we'll just get 3x random doujin or something tonight. We'll know soon enough, I guess.

^ Pretty much. Thing is: I don't post a lot, I'll give you that. When I do it's mostly silly stuff or in one of the chatter threads, but mostly because I don't really have anything to contribute to one of the core sub-forums or threads. I don't develop VNs (yet), and I've read pretty much everything I wanted to read (which is not a whole lot), so there's nothing for me to talk about. I like spending time with the community members, and opt not to moderate too heavily, because that's what the moderators are there for, right? Wrong. If I went around swinging the ban-hammer I might as well call it Lucille (props to whoever gets the reference), because thing's turn bad, people used to and feel entitled to the fluffiness that is the normal moderation flow; You can get away with pretty much anything, as long as you don't bitch about it and tone it down. That's when I like to make an appearance, to remind each and one of us that some things are not okay, and while the moderating team is tripping over their own feet trying to figure out how to go about a particular issue without offending anyone, I just do. I'm here to remind people that there are other, very real people sitting in front of their computers, that you think you can talk down and feel bad about whatever happened to make you so angry that you'd probably think twice about in your everyday life to throw a tantrum like that. People would call that out, and rightfully so. I'm the priviledge check that comes ringing bells, and reminds people that some things are just not okay, and shouldn't be tolerated. When I do, things have usually gone way past sour already, so lately I've been trying to keep an eye on a few things, topics and certain people. Which is not favoritism or persecution, but just the plain reality: Some people will get people on edge, no matter what they do. I'm definitely one of them, which is why I tend to stay in the background. We're here thanks to the creators and the people who built this site, and I think it's disrespectful to feel entitled about any of it - without them, nothing would be here. Without interested and motivated people we'd probably still be torrenting VNs left and right, instead of seeing some actual quality being put out, both from established companies and indie groups. I'm fighting for them, and I think everyone who's dealt with me in the past can confirm that I do so consistently - heck, I even fought my then-girlfriend back in the day when shit hit the fan over one of the very, very rare bans, that I of all people thought was uncalled for. Anyways, and that's why I wanted bitfatround0 to back off of OriginalRen: The guy's fighting the good fight, no matter what happened to any of the files. Back off, and leave the guy be, enjoy your time on these forums or reddit, but god damn people, stop it with the entitlement. I know it's rough waiting on something you're really interested in, but it's not your place to bitch about any or no progress being made, unless it's your own project, and then you're in charge, so take matters into your own two hands. With that said, peace.

I have an odd feeling that this is actually a real person having the time of his life trolling the shit out of everyone...

From a PR perspective, clearly a total failure. From a research perspective, though, this was probably a success beyond their wildest dreams. When they get over what was undoubtedly a rather harrowing experience, I bet the people who built this are going to realize they now have a mountain of useful research data and tons of ideas for techniques to properly use that research data.