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That's funny, the old look is exactly why I do want to read it.

I can only think about this 2 games right now: (with a mother as main heroine with normal tits and yet not a pure nukige) https://vndb.org/v4824 https://vndb.org/v7653 if you have issues "buying" them let me know

as the title says. listen, i dont mind big boobs but i am kind of sick of milfs having massive breasts. i get that it represents motherhood and such but GAH! pretty please, kind non-judgmental people of fuwa.

Yeah it's a pretty small niche you're looking for there. Potentially a hole in the market!

They really shouldn't though at least in the case of the setting of the VN being Japan its part of the culture and should be kept accurate its kind of the same reason most Japanese dubs of English media dont add honorifics to English names. Personally when I see translations go out of there way to avoid using them or try to use not fitting English words it just makes the quality of the translation look lower even if that is not truly the case.

Let me add one more thought about the translations. I'm currently reading Clannad, and it indeed is fine. However, I didn't perceive LB! to be substantially worse than it. I started to wonder why , and it's probably due to English not being my first language. Thanks to that, many things that feel bad or unnatural for native speakers don't hit me directly. I'd probably be similarly critical about translations into my native language as Fred is about english ones. And if presented with not-too-good translations into PL and EN - I'd probably choose english one, because errors in it wouldn't be as glaring and disturbing for me.

Quoting out of context makes it easier to make good joke replies. Besides while they aren't state of the art in visual technology, I expected much worse when people referred to those titles as looking old. They are perfectly fine by my standards for story driven VNs. Vanilla nukige not so much, but then again that's not a genre I'm particularly interested in in the first place.

Maybe he meant the games themselves look old? (because they are)

First you complain about too big boobs, next you complain about looking old. Are you sure you are looking for MILFs? Sounds more like loli to me

Well, you can't call a decent translation "horrible" regardless what position you're in. That's just taking it way too far. If he said it's lacking and some words and sentences are lost in translation then i'd believe that, but "horrible" is such an over exaggeration, especially when no one else complains about it. You always hear about bad translations.

By "MILF" are you refering strictly to "mother" characters, or are generally speaking about adult heroines? If the latter, then - from the ones that I read - there's Masumi from Kazoku Keikaku and Kaori from Crescendo.

I've been considering this for some time, but it has suddenly become a reality. To be blunt, I've come to my limit when it comes to playing pure SOL games. Oh, I can still enjoy many of them, but if you asked me whether I can look at them without my resentment of 'normal' SOL content blinding me, the answer is no. If I have to read through one more template date scene or see another osananajimi climb through the window from next door, I'm going to start tearing out the last remaining hairs atop my head. *coughs* Ahem, now that I've got that out, it needs to be said that I've been doing this since September of 2012... a ridiculous amount of time to be playing roughly 80% of all non-nukige VNs that come out (I'm figuring those I dropped or just couldn't play because they were just that bad into the twenty percent). Just to be clear, I will still continue to play VNs and comment on/review them in this blog. However, I will no longer play as many outside my tastes, nor will I go out of my way to seek gems from companies I hate reading from. I realized while I was playing Koisaku (Ensemble's latest game), that a few years ago, I would have read this game without any real problems, and I wouldn't even have blinked at the crap that now drives me up the wall. Oh sure, Ensemble's base quality has fallen massively, but when I took a step back, this is actually one of the better amongst their more recent games, with plenty of indications of real stories for the heroines in the background. However, I found I just couldn't tolerate it. It hit me in the date scene that occurs in the common route... I have no tolerance for date scenes at all anymore. Scenes like that exist for every heroine in every SOL VN, and they all turn out in almost an identical fashion. Reading it, even though it was basically a 'friend date', was like dragging my brain through mud. I just couldn't do it. I promised myself that I wouldn't BS myself on this particular matter years ago... and I knew the limit was coming. I just didn't realize that it would be this soon. So, I have to announce that this is the end of my VN of the Month column. Now, all that remains is my Random VNs and whatever VNs I choose to play each month. I will continue to play what I'm interested in, and that will probably include slice-of-life at times. However, I will no longer play SOL out of a sense of duty to my readers. My original reasons for starting VN of the Month When I first started Clephas' VN of the Month, it was because vndb gives nothing to you for info on their games beyond poor tls of the game summary from Getchu, character profiles, and sometimes tags (that might or might not be accurate). I felt that that didn't do most games justice, and I hated the way I had to go into a game blind on so many occasions. As such, I started putting up commentaries on just what kind of VN I was playing, with few or no spoilers. This was a need that, at the time, was not being fulfilled (and as far as I know, still isn't, since most reviewers include major spoilers because they are inconsiderate). Over time, my routine each month started with figuring out which games weren't nukige and which I would play first... and picking out which one was the best after I played them (the latter of course being entirely a matter of my opinion, informed as it might be). However, it is time to set down my burden. I tried handing off my work to others, and that worked for a while (thanks to @Dergonu@fun2novel@BookwormOtaku@Kiriririri for their help over the last year - yes, even you, Kiriririri). In the end, though, I'm just one man... and one middle-aged man with increasingly bad health isn't going to be able to keep this up any longer. Heck, I'm amazed i kept going this long. I do hope someone else takes up the torch of at least informing people of what to expect in newer games (and not just the ones from popular companies), but that isn't my job anymore. Thanks for reading, Clephas

Finished Sorcery Jokers the other day. What a ride and a half that was! That VN had some rather profound themes too. Asahi best girl (I just love how bold she is). While Ruu is ..... unforgettable (that scene when the tables FINALLY flipped on her was crazy extreme!). Time for my next read ......... well ........ thy time has cometh! *Installs Muv-Luv* ..... doesn't Sumika's voice sound familiar? *checks VNDB* Yep, has the same voice as Grisaia's Amane. Apparently all the big sister types have the same voice

Confession: Okay, so I managed to get my learner's permit yesterday with 40/48 questions answered correctly on the test. Holy yikes the test here in Florida was way harder than the one I took for Texas. I was only allowed to get up to 10 questions wrong, so I was getting a little shaky once I got to 6, and the other two I answered incorrectly out of sheer nervousness (at which point I started deep breathing exercises). I almost failed the vision test too, but only because there were a couple letters that were easy to mistake for others. Probably didn't help at all that I haven't had my glasses updated in a few years... Yeah, I guess it was something of a miracle that I even got my permit in the first place, lol. And don't worry, I will update my glasses soon! In other news, I discovered a cool new way to boost my exercise by reintroducing caffeine back into my daily routine! I had given it up in the past when I was desperate to get my sleep under control because I was so used to drinking it in the afternoon and didn't like the idea of drinking it in the morning (I just didn't feel like it). But eventually the sleep deprivation I've been experiencing has hurt my ability to concentrate on studying due to lack of energy. After watching Doctor Mike's video on sleep, I got the idea to start drinking tea again to see if it could help at all, and it ended up helping me in ways I wasn't expecting it to! It was thanks to that extra energy I from that tea that my performance in both studying and even exercising has improved. It worked so well, in fact, that I went from running on the elliptical for 47 minutes at a moderate pace to 65 minutes at a slightly elevated pace. In fact, I wasn't even tired by the end of it either, so I think I'll try running that with a little more resistance tomorrow. Studying has also been a little more tolerable, though I'm still having issues concentrating for longer than 20 minutes. Maybe I should take up meditation or something.

Those are some pretty interesting points you all made. Regarding sexual content - just as Lunaterra wrote - I like my games having sex in them. The only difference is, I truly enjoy it when it's meaningful, instead of being devalued to exaggerated fanservice sex romps; many vns treat erotic content like some sort of wish fulfilment for their players to indulge in, not to mention sex rarely works like that in real life. Outside the scope of sex as drama (NTR, arranged marriages, rape) and reproduction, sex is something we do to comfort ourselves. It's selfish - indeed - but there's nothing wrong in demanding love from people who want to share it with you. You take it in and want to repay for their kindness in return. This is what relationships are about. Very few games reach that sort of character development and I really hate when likeable characters are suddenly forced into a pointless sex scene by their creators, just because medium demands it. It's the most grave sin any writer could make. VNs need to stop being porn on purpose, if they want to achieve something more, otherwise they will never crawl out of the hellhole they're stuck in. Regarding lolicon, I presume it's quite similar as with porn. Writers need to stop treating lolita characters as walking fetish fuel dispensers. Younger characters can sometimes give a completely different outlook on many elements within a story from their perspective. In the end, it obviously depends on the writers themselves, but ultimately - if a character exists only for the porn, you're getting nowhere, unless it's a porn game you wanted to create. By all means - I'm not saying to stop creating nukige games, as they have their own place as well. What I'm saying is that all devs - but especially western ones - should start trying harder, because I'm certain they are capable of that. We can truly create immersive, story-driven vns. It's just a pity so many creators end up falling into this niche they dug up under themselves.

The biggest one: We need to stop treating VNs like they're Video Games Lite. I think we're all guilty of this (myself included), but by doing so, we're effectively limiting VNs' potential reader base to just gamers. An assumption I see often is that gameplay VNs like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa are inherently more newbie-friendly than normal VNs or especially kinetic novels. This only makes sense if you're assuming that you're trying to market VNs to gamers. I'm not saying that it's bad to try to get gamers into VNs, but why should we limit ourselves to that? Why are they the only audience that we're trying to get? Other groups who might be interested in visual novels: Regular novel readers. Yes, they still exist. This is such an obvious thing to me (after all, we're trying to promote visual novels) that it almost amazes me that almost nobody considers that people who like to read might be interested in...well, reading. Comics fans, especially fans of indie comics. We're seeing a tiny bit of overlap between indie comics and EVNs already. I read a short yuri VN named Serre by Adrienne Bazir not too long ago that does really nice things with CGs and sprite animations (especially considering she did everything except the music/sound effects). There's also an interactive graphic novel (which I haven't had the opportunity to buy yet) that came out recently named It Will Be Hard that I've seen get a good reception. I don't know if it'd be called a VN per se, but surely it'd be of interest to people who are interested in interactive storytelling? There's a lot of things that our mediums could learn from each other if we bothered to expand outside our normal horizons. People with disabilities who can't/don't want to play "normal" video games. After all, 99% of VNs have no interactivity beyond clicking to advance the text and possibly making choices. This makes them inherently more accessible than 99% of video games. There are some things to keep in consideration (for example, making sure you can access the menu easily; adding screen reader or text-to-speech support for visually-impaired readers; adding an option to use a dyslexic-friendly font like OpenDyslexic), but overall, making a VN accessible is much easier than making your average video game accessible. More things that would help VNs' reputation and encourage people to check out the medium: Stop pretending that porn is a necessary component to VNs. I'm not saying "drop the porn" (that'd be hypocritical of me, since I've wished for more 18+ otome in the past), but it's off-putting to a lot of people, and a lot of time it's shoehorned in anyway. Sex in VNs should be treated the same way as it is in books: some books have sex in them, in some books (erotica) sex is the whole point, but you don't need to have sex in a novel for it to be considered literature, nor does having a sex scene in it automatically disqualify a book from being literature. Longer is not always better. I personally like long stories, but a lot of people just don't have the time (or, yes, attention span) for a 50-hour epic. There's value in shorter VNs that tell a good story not just despite, but because of their length...similarly, by holding longer works up on a pedestal, we're encouraging creators to add pointless shit to pad the length of their stories, which just wastes everyone's time. We need to support diverse VNs by diverse creators. Diverse settings, diverse characters, diverse plots, diverse artwork. Basically have something for everyone. There's nothing wrong with high school stories, but it's boring when it seems like that's the only setting that people will read. Part of this is supporting EVNs and EVN creators, who may not have the budgets that the big Japanese eroge creators do, but who are still doing cool stuff. (There's this weird perception that EVNs try too hard to be like JVNs and are all set in Japanese high schools, which hasn't been the case for years? Katawa Shoujo and DDLC aren't representative of the EVN scene as a whole, for a lot of reasons. I will say that there's a disproportionately high number of anime-style EVNs, but even then there are plenty of exceptions. That's just the first few I found when going through my VNDB collection.) I think the reaction to this year's AX announcements really shows how much pushback there can be against stories that don't fit into the mold of "normal" eroge: JAST USA announced three BL VNs, and MangaGamer announced one BL and one yuri VN, and people are complaining about this year's AX being "overly gay," or about how MG has supposedly "abandoned" the "traditional eroge audience" (never mind that they also announced two Rance games and already have plenty of "normal" eroge in the pipeline) and is now a "fujoshi paradise." I understand the appeal of self-inserting, but some of my favorite stories have been about people very different from me--in fact, a fully-fleshed character who's very different from me can be easier to relate to than a blank-slate protagonist. Basically, if I can read through VNs with straight male protagonists and manage to enjoy them, a straight guy can read through an otome or BL game without...dying, or whatever you think will happen if you touch something not aimed at straight men. Don't promote lolicon/shotacon stuff. This creeps out the vast majority of people, myself included. Maitetsu was a mistake. Just because it's legal (in the US) doesn't mean we have to support it.

I think the best we could do is make people realize that saying "I like visual novels!" have the same effect as "I like movies!". As in, it tells you absolutely nothing. "What type of visual novel" is the key here. We could make people see there's a VN out there with themes you like, it's not all just about having sex with as many girls as possible. Like anime. People know that hentais like Bible Black exist, yet they also know they can pick other things like Re:Zero, Yuru Camp or Devilman Crybaby. "Visual Novel" is a term that includes a whoooooooooole lot of different things, so we could try to make it more clear somehow. Yeah, that too. We can be kind of a circle jerking bunch at times. And that unfortunately helps create said image that "all VNs are the same". I have a friend that loves horror and gore games in general, including some VNs. So I suggested them to register here, but they didn't want to because, in their outsider eyes, "we only talk about Grisaia and the like, so they wouldn't find anything worth it in here". We want to make visual novels popular in the west, but, for some outsiders, only a select few. That and the whole Aaeru thing that it's still attached to us whether we like it or not, even if it's long gone. That's... a terrible image we have tbh. I agree with this as well. Let's be honest, the easiest way to make VNs popular is to promote even more quick ecchi things like Winged Cloud games and meme games that youtubers would easily pick up. And with time they'll become even more cheap or even more meme. That's REALLY how we want to be popular?

I agree with this statement and it's something I have been wondering about every single time this topic is asked. Why would I personally want VNs to be popular? I still don't have an answer, meaning most likely I'm not really that interested in VN popularity. A worst case scenario is activists resulting in a ban. It's not like activists haven't got a history of resorting to lying to reach their goal. Take for instance the activists attacking Lego. They proclaimed how bad it is for animals with oil spills and their solution to the problem is to get rid of oil companies. The way to do that would be to attack companies with contracts with oil companies because if people stop buying oil, the problem is solved. They went into Legoland and poured oil on some Lego houses, which then went into water and ground etc, but remember it was for a good cause. Lego stated that they have the contract to get non-toxic plastic and the world market can't deliver the amount they need, which is why they have a long term contract with an oil company (remember plastic is made out of oil). The activists didn't care and had a victory when the contract was canceled. Delivering toxic toys to children. It must be a dream come true for activists. They really made a difference. Lego however made a new contract with a different oil company, but that was apparently ok for the activists. They were fighting to get the contract canceled and they won. So what if nothing changed regarding oil. I dare not to think about what people with a mindset like that would say about VNs. There are quite a lot of activists where facts and goals doesn't really matter. It's mainly about a crusade against some great evil and it doesn't matter if their claim is right or not. Remember when Go Go Nippon went on Steam Greenlight, one of the very first comments was "this must be one of those Japanese rape games" and then a bunch of comments followed about people flaming Steam for allowing something, which promotes rape. All age rape title... go figure. As I said: facts doesn't matter. Another reason why I'm not to keen on getting VNs too big in the west is that once a market becomes big, big companies moves in and change everything. It will end up as TV: bland, the end user should be entertained with mindless stuff and don't think and it has to be political correct. In other words VNs could very well end up being what I try to avoid by picking VNs. What would happen for me if VNs make it big? More titles? Perhaps, but to be completely honest my backlog of unread VNs grow as it is. I wouldn't benefit from more titles. Better titles? I just wrote releases would likely drop in quality, not increase. More popular might be good for publishers, but I'm not sure it's good for me personally. And let's not forget VNs aren't big in Japan. Bigger than in the west, but it's still a niche, which never was and likely never will be big.

the thing im always concerned about is do we really want to vns to have the same amount of publicity as anime or manga in the west? imagine maitetsu, a vn about loli characters with the option to sex those characters being well known as attack on titan, for instance. a whole mess of activists and established governments would step in and regulate that kind of content and may just ban the content all together.

My favourite announcement this AX has to be Harumade Kururu, followed by the confirmation of YU-NO and the announcement of Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. MG didn't have anything this time to catch my interest, but you can't always get what you want. And while those titles aren't at the top of my most wanted list, it could have been far worse. The reason why some people are disappointed is just that the VN fanbase consist of many groups. Some want nukige, some want otome games or BL or chuunige and so on. And with only a handful of publishers and only a limited number of releases to distribute between those groups it's impossible to make everyone happy. In the end VNs are medium and in the same way that people aren't fans of all movies or all books, people are not fan of all VN. But that's just my guess. Overall I enjoyed what AX had to offer and look forward to Otakon.

Holy shit, are people here for real with devaluation of the last good bits this game has, lol. Lose makes lolige, but they try to keep it reasonably down to earth and emotional for most of the part, where it matters. If you want porn and dirty talking, go play Little Bitch Girls in Hog Farm.

Update 1.2, now with more tiddy! Maitetsu 18+ Restoration Patch 1.2

VNs missed the boat as they would have had to have taken off in the non-instant entertainment era. People don't read any more; that's why VNs will never be popular in the west.

first one looks interesting. may check it out. problem is they look... old. please dont crucify me old friend. also, i dont know anything about it since theres no synopsis on vndb. i might be persuaded to check it out based on its premise. just a distinctly older heroine. older than kaori in crescendo. shes more of a big sister. i mean, i know she is the big sister but i mean someone who is much older.