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Does the thought that if you did another girl's route, that girl would live a broken life, never come to terms with her trauma, or even kill herself not bother anyone else? That thought makes me feel like a horrible person tbh. Or am I just overthinking things? Maybe i'm the only person who humanized fictional characters to that extent.

Can't believe this wasn't explicitly mentioned yet: Read the route you want to read most first and the one you want to read the second most, last. Procrastinating the characters you don't care much about makes it almost impossible to get yourself to read the entire thing.

In most cases the main point of Yuri is to portray a relationship between girls (and it doesn't even have to be strictly romantic or sexual), so having a traditionally really involved plot is not that essential, and would sometimes even be a detriment. Works with heavier focus on plot do exist to some extent, but are definitely rarer and even more so if only looking at (translated) VNs. Plus like any genre Yuri has it own tropes, customs and aesthetics, and SoL-like low-key and mundane character interactions is definitely one of them. I personally believe that this is one of the best ways to actually develop/present characters, but each to their own. Subtle ambiguity in the relationships is also one of the charming characteristic of Yuri, so if you are looking for strong conclusions Yuri might not be for you. SeaBed doesn't have explicit "drama" because all of the characters refuse to needlessly dramatise their situations. Throwing a fit, wallowing in sadness or confronting someone wouldn't help anything. That doesn't mean there isn't any drama, the character obviously grieve and feel lost inside, it's just not presented as explicitly as you would normally expect. SeaBed is purposefully very passive and low-key. Same with the mystery. There are definitely answers, but once again they are not just thrown in the face of the reader, and solving the mystery isn't really the point of the story.

I think it's a bit of a genre trope. Yuri is a relatively small niche and that by itself means less variety, and just as Maggie elaborated, many of those highly-rated yuri VNs are pretty much collections of well-written, romantic fluff, that skip on having a goal other than bringing the characters together. Those that focus on the plot, on the other hand, like Fatal Twelve or Shadows of Pygmalion, are simply light on romance. You stressed satisfying relationships in your post a lot and it just happens that yurige don't seem to combine those with a compelling intrigue that often (if ever). Even Flowers, which I personally adore, is more about interactions between the characters, their backstories and many small subplots rather than the overaching story (especially the first episode). It flows at a very relaxed pace with myriads of SoL scenes and occassional drama/mystery. It's beautiful to watch and quite enthralling with its characters, but don't really follow the setup - conflict - resolution rythm. It might indeed have more in common with an episodic SoL anime than the kind of hypothetical VN you tried to describe.

One is psychological drama/mystery and the other lighthearted romance. They could only be further apart if Seabed was a guro horror TBH, but both are excellent games in their own right. EDIT: BTW, I'm a bit lost on what you're exactly looking for... If you want a strictly plot-driven yuri VN, where romance is not really the focus but is somewhat decently developed I guess Fatal Twelve and Aoishiro are your best bets. If you want to see the romance blooming throughout the game, Kindred Spirits, Highway Blossoms and Lonely Yuri are good choices, although they don't include any intense drama or drastic character development. Flowers is maybe the yuri series most concentrated on character development, but it's also super melodramatic and not really that concerned with plot progression...? And if you're looking for "Subahibi but full yuri", I don't think that exists or will ever happen.

Yeaaaah, I'm not clicking that link...

I love Eushully's unique fantasy world, Dir Lifyna. Most of Eushully's games, save for a few oddball ones by the subsidiary Anastasia and Fortune Arterial, are based in this world, which began with the original Ikusa Megami (if this gets translated, somebody please smash the skull of anyone who translates the title, because they'll probably pick the worst permutation of it). The first thing that anyone going into this setting should know, if only for giggles, is that this was never intended to be an expansive setting containing ten or more games. Ikusa Megami was intended as a one-off game and was competing with Venus Blood, of all things. However, to the people who played the game, the setting was incredibly attractive, and they sold well enough to justify a sequel, which was even more well-received (if only because the dungeon-crawler elements were toned down to normal jrpg levels). The basic setting of the world is that, far in the past, a technologically-advanced human world created a gate/tunnel linking a world full of magic and demihumans, for reasons that pretty much boil down to boredom and stagnation as a species due to excessive technological development. Unfortunately, this accidentally caused the two worlds to begin to merge, causing a conflict between their denizens and their gods. An important common element to note between the two worlds is that gods existed in both worlds, but the gods of the human world had mostly ceased intervening in mortal affairs openly long before, causing the near death of faith. Since faith/belief is the source of all deities' power, the humans found themselves at a surprising disadvantage in the war, because their belief in their deities was almost nonexistent. Worse, magic was quite capable of countering most of the advantages of human tech based on pure physics. A faction of humanity chose to pursue the amalgamation of magic and tech, creating wonders and horrors (including artificial demons and gods), but over time (the war apparently lasted for generations), more and more humans switched sides, devoting themselves to gods on the other side, even as humanity's old gods were destroyed, sealed, or enslaved one by one. By the end of the war, humanity was just another race, perhaps more numerous than the others, in the service of the 'Living Gods', and the 'Old Gods' were relegated to dusty legend and actively considered evil by most, if they weren't in the service of a Living God. Human technology was, for the most part, wiped from the face of the new, merged world, and the only remnants can be found in ruins filled with monsters and/or automatic guardians. The dominant deity of the new world is Marsterria, a minor war god who enslaved and killed more Old Gods than any other. Most of his worshipers are humans, their prolific breeding and generations of faith having given him immense power. His followers are often at odds with the protagonist of the Ikusa Megami series and nonhuman races, because of their excessive zealotry and broad determination of what species are considered 'dark races'. Conflict between dark gods and their servants and the gods of light and theirs is a normal part of the world of Dir Lifyna, with neutral regions and nations often becoming the battlegrounds for said followers as a result. This is a world with a massive number of intelligent species, and that, in the end, is what makes it so much fun to look forward to each game, even if the flop ratio is over 50%, lol. Damn, it was hard to do that without spoiling anything. Edit: It should be noted that demons, angels, nagas, and a few other races were actually coexisting with humanity but hidden due to their more direct service to deities in the original human world. The nagas still maintain faith with old gods for the most part, and as a result, they are marginalized to an immense degree. Most angels 'fell' or serve one of the Living Gods now (or both), and demons are a plague, with more summoned on occasion since demon summoning was one of the few magics that remained to humanity when the worlds met.

That's why TexasDice said you should keep the second best route for last. You still end on a high note that way.

Loved the game, played every route. My recommendation is to play the game with whatever heroine you want (I did Lesteena for instance first and foremost). There are a few heroines that you can only do after NG+ but otherwise if the battles are an issue for you, you can just use a trainer to get through the "gameplay" aspect of it. Most of the game is pretty linear with maybe 2ish hours worth of content related to heroines in specific, otherwise many share similar "routes" and only minor changes come from choosing them. The recommended route is mainly just due to related plots diverging from the main heroine. Aselia->Esperia->Orpha->Uruka->Lesteena->Kyouko->Tokimi. Aselia is the main heroine and relates to Esperia, Orpha, Uruka, the later three slightly diverge and maybe Orpha only having a bit more additional content related to her specific plot. Lesteena is pretty separate from the above 4 so there isn't really a lose in playing hers (and after playing all the routes I personally still enjoyed hers the most but that's personal opinion). Kyouko and Tokimi are NG+, the later was a good route and probably my second favourite next to lesteena. Then there is of course the failed-to-get-heroines route and the bad route... tl;dr choose whichever YOU personally like, you won't miss much, then if you want to go back and do the rest and if you dislike/annoyed by the gameplay, trainer it. Don't care what anyone says Eien no Aselia is one of my favs.

As I don't like making new threads for random stuff, I guess I can just post it here... Tumblr suddenly lost its mind and decided to boot the only reason anyone cares about the site, that is nsfw content. I don't really care about its suicidal tendencies, but just as it happened with JiveJournal a few years ago, it would suck to see content creators that build whole communities and often their livelihoods around the site having to leave it and lose much of what they worked for. There's a petition to make Tumblr go back on the policy change - it has little chance to work, but I still prefer it over doing nothing. I encourage everyone to join in, if you don't want to see innocent anime boobs being culled in mass. https://www.change.org/p/tumblr-com-allow-nsfw-content-on-tumblr

Finally got started with Clannad. Too bad that I can only read it when I'm home alone, since I keep screaming at the screen... Yeah, I don't take second-hand embarrassment too well, and Sunohara is the goshdarned master of it. I mean, I like him - he's like that small dumb puppy that thinks it's a wolf and keeps getting chased by the neighbor's bulldog... But damn, are some of the scenes where he gets in trouble hard to read (for me, at least). Also, both him and Tomoya are arseholes. Likable arseholes, but still arseholes. I don't really have an opinion on the girls yet, since I've only met 4 so far, and just for a little while each (Tomoyo and the dorm mom whose name I don't remember yet seem pretty cool, tho). I wonder what's the deal with the dead world, too. It seems so out of place... We'll see, we'll see. Ah, as a side note - I've finished Kokonoe Kokoro the other day. Man, was it painfully generic. I don't think that the script was even written with having a monster girl heroine in mind, it was just the plainest, most boring high school romance I've ever read. The fact that Kokoro is a giant fuckin' grasshopper didn't come up even once! I know that it'll sound pathetic, but I'm disappointed. Like yeah, I know, what the heck did I expect, but if Hatoful Boyfriend could do it, then Kokonoe Kokoro could too. Shame.

Well, when all is said and done, the most important thing is that you enjoy yourself. No point reading at all if you're not having fun.

As others have already said and I agree, avoid picking up another VN. It's not that you shouldn't read more than one at a time, but rather, if you are switching because you got fed up with your current read, you're most likely never going back to it. What's more, you're probably also gonna eventually drop the new one, in an endless loop If you're dropping a VN that is of course fine, but be honest with yourself. My advice is, if you find yourself tired of reading, just do something else for a while, maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. Take the time you need so you come back to it feeling that urge to read again and finish that story.

I've realized that this is extremely important, at least for me. It hasn't made me stop reading a VN, but it has taken away a lot of the enjoyment because I start looking forward to the next one. Most recently, this happened with Ever17. I liked it a lot at first, but then I read a bit about Swan Song and wanted to find out for myself why people consider it depressing/disgusting/whatever, so I started thinking "I want to finish Ever17 as soon as possible so I can start reading Swan Song" and that made me unable to enjoy Ever17 as much as I should have.

Actually, I miss the time when i had enough time and motivation to do that. Yeah, it makes sense. I noticed with myself that when it takes me more than that to finish something, I usually start to want some variety, no matter how much I enjoyed that VN at first. At the same time, if I take short breaks to read or watch something else, it becomes a lot easier to keep myself motivated. I read the first Grisaia this way, and even though it took me about three months to finish it this way, and I definitely still liked it overall and never really got bored.

I think this depends on the story. It took me a whopping three months to finish the first ChusinGura game in Japanese, but I loved every moment of it. (Actually wanted it to be longer by the end, lol. Luckily it had a fandisk ) The way I see it, if you enjoy a VN, its length shouldn't matter. Even if you only have an hour or so to read a day, you'll at least have fun reading for that hour.

I'd be lying both to myself and to you guys if I told you "do this do that" because I can never do things exactly like that. but, I can share my thoughts. vn's are like books so, reading 5books at the same time of course would be impossible to finish. unless you're someone who can focus on something for a long time...which I'm not, like LemiusK said; I get bored easily and need new entertaintment because my brain is curious and doesn't like rushing or being just too slow on things. and since i'm a multitasker I can't bring myself to do only one thing cause it just feels plain boring&tiring mentally. Anyway, I dont' mean to talk about myself here but give the message. which is doing things that is compatible with your personality and brain can be a good idea. Like, I have tons of games to finish but although I ramble how I can't finish them all... to be honest, I just don't wanna lol. my pace is slow, so going with your pace and having fun is great.

I didn't play it for long, but translation is decent enough on first glance. The problem is that the game has bad performance on weak PC and take enormous space on hdd (about ~25gb). So I decide to wait Switch version.

It escaped many, because initial release was only JP and CN. English translation was added recently, and, since it is published by developers themselves, with no information about who did it, or how was it done, it is understandable to be afraid of bad or machine translation. Also, the developer is pretty new (4 years old), all their previous games being PSV exclusives. If this gets on winter sale, I'll my give it a try, but for full price I'm not ready to take a risk

Well, I'm a bit of an anomaly. Like I said, my attention span is short, possibly even to the extent of ADD, so my case is not exactly the normal kind of behavior most people would exhibit.

Interesting. I'm kind of opposite. If VN manages to capture me with its characters and atmosphere, then I'm totally drawn in, and can read it even for 5-6 hours a day (basically, whole afternoon & evening ). I felt it quite strongly with Princess Evangile and Majikoi for example - I just enjoyed staying in that world and spending time with the characters. Now I'm rereading PE, and it's as enjoyable as it was then, and they're like good old friends. I was all like "Ah, Rise, Chiho, Ayaka, Ritsuko, everybody - nice to see you again " I tend to stick to one VN at any given time - the current exception is having Hanahira as kind of side-read, but that's more for JP learning. I just jump into it for an ~hour, read a scene or two, and put it back.

I don't think I'll ever not read multiple VNs at the same time. Personally, I'm more likely to stop reading a VN if I'm only reading one or two stories at the same time because of the lack of variety. For someone whose attention span is as bad as mine, I simply can't stand sticking to one routine for a long time. More often than not, I stopped reading VNs, watching anime, or playing video games because I was seeking something else more interesting, because I was getting that bored of the same scenery. So in order to keep myself interested, visiting six different worlds of different genres at the same time seems to be a more efficient method so far working for me. If I had forced myself to read The Labyrinth of Grisaia in one go (instead of splitting it up between my reading of other VNs), I think I would have dropped it long ago. Same with The Fruit of Grisaia. As fun as the comedy was, as great as the story might be, the lack of variety is the killer of interest for myself.

Currently I want to make a patch for [PSP] Tomoyo its wonderful Life, but the texts is in the .PAK file. I tried some tools but they did not work. And when I looked at Fuwanovel forum, I recognized a tool called "PakDecomp", which seemed to be able to Extract .PAK files. Unfortunately, as Tlwiki seems dead, I can not enter it to Download, and I can not find it anywhere else. (;´∀｀) So I hope everyone help me a little, if everyone have any PakDecomp Link, or other tools, please share it with me. I'm really serious about this work, and want Visual Novel to grow more. Arigatougozaimasu. (*^▽^*)

Most of it will probably repeat what other people said already, but here goes: - Pick VNs that your attention span can handle. - Try to read only one VN at a time. If it's long, you can break it up here and there with shorter ones, but be careful not to overdo it. - Take breaks. Nobody can stay interested forever. - Read because you want to, not because you "have to". If you push it, you'll probably lose interest completely. - Be a completionist by nature. I know it can't be helped, but if you are, you're in luck (?).

NOT having a full time job, or not having a family, or other time wasters ........... also helps

thank you thank you! looks like cute people are everywhere here. (笑) ah. all time favs are Cartagra and Kara no Shoujo. Usually titles by Innocent Grey makes me emotional more than usual...their yuri series Flowers as well. if they make a vn with yuri&murder mystery one day...I can't even imagine the hype.

I think it's very tough to get a yuri VN with both a good measure of plot (not counting romance plot) AND romance. Given that your example is Subahibi, perhaps go for something that may be considered light on romance, but still classes as yuri? These are outside of my own personal knowledge, but seem like good contenders and have all but one been mentioned in this thread or your previous one: Katahane, Aoishiro, Ne no Kami, Fatal Twelve and The Shadows of Pygmalion.

Welcome, welcome! What are your favourite VNs thus far?

What Lesiak was saying is that in Kindred Spirits, Lonely Yuri and Highway Blossoms the romance is the main part of the plot. It's like the "goal" of the game is for the couple/couples (KS have more than one) to realize they love each other and get together happy. That's it. Even if there's something more, the deal of the game is to read for the romance progression. Although you mention "recovering from a traumatic event", so maybe you're okay with some mundane drama? I wanted to recommend Nurse Love Addiction, as there are some plot going on there, but the common route can be quite heavy with SoL, so I don't know what you'll think of that. Fatal Twelve is also a good choice, as it's very plot driven, but it can be a bit too light in the romance part.

Kindred Spirits is a good feels and relaxation game. Play it if you just want to kick back and have a very pleasant time. There's no super involved plot or anything, but I wouldn't say it has no story. It's a series of romance stories, where the characters' relationships are developing on a pretty regular basis. Like, genuine development instead of them just hanging out for a while before spontaneously hooking up. It's really well-done, while still largely avoiding groan-worthy melodrama. I wrote a review for it a few years ago: https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2016/03/16/kindred-spirits-on-the-roof/

Dafuq? Are you guys psychics or something? How did you guys know I'll be here? Anyways, CeruleanGamer the NTR Witch has arrived to educate you lovelies the beauty of Netorare. Not everyone who reads NTR are masochist. I am naturally a hard S when it comes to fetishes and pornography and NTR highly appeals to me because.... For me, the greatest appeal of NTR is the CORRUPTION ASPECT. Nothing is tastier than seeing a well mannered girl or even a strong willed girl become submissive once she surrenders to lust. It's just lovely to see. Most people have the notion that women are these pure and beautiful creatures who do nothing out of the ordinary, but the NTR genre pushes it out of bounds by mixing the powerful emotion of jealousy and depression to create a setting where your typical woman is now a lot hornier and sex crazed than the male protagonist. It's like an escape in real life because the current social outlook in real life is that men are perverts and are always thinking about sex. In NTR, it's different. You now have the girl who is hornier and is willing to surrender herself and become someone's plaything. There is this old saying: "Men want to sleep with the whore but want to marry the Madonna." NTR reverses that and makes the Madonna, the Mary Sue, the Yamato Nadeshiko, the prim and proper wife the whore and the mixture of corruption, exhibitionism, and voyeurism spices it up and doesn't make it as boring as your typical vanilla VN where it's just a meet n fuck, happily ever after setting. P.S. Thanks to @Nosebleed for summarizing the types of NTR. Glad I didn't have to write a couple more paragraphs for that.

I hate how Vancouver isn't located on Vancouver Island.

I have unknowingly went my entire life eating chicken periods. This revelation has left me in a state of shock. Once again, I realize that ignorance is bliss. The more I discover about life, the more I realize that things are being kept hidden from us for a reason. I have reached enlightenment in the worst way possible.

I mean, you thought the eggs you eat on your breakfast were laid by the easter bunny? edit: it came out harsher than I intended, sorry

Not finishing them at all.

Sorry for the post necromancy. I thought the original poster, if they're still around five years later, might be happy to hear that someone else found their list useful. "50 VNs to read before you die" Well, guess what - I am literally dying and trying to read these 50 VNs before I do in the yearish time I have left. I just sort of stumbled upon this bucket list goal and I've already read a good 15 in a couple months (I have infinite free time atm and literally play all day). No regrets from this course of action so far! It's an excellent usage of time given my circumstances and it makes me feel like I'm living multiple lives without having to leave home. So many ups and downs, so much catharsis. So much of it connects to the relationships and experiences I've had so far in life. I only wish I had discovered VNs earlier, but I do think I have just enough time to read all the good (translated) ones. I've picked up a few random games not on this list as my interests broaden (went through a Yandere phase for example) and I'm sure there's at least one or two games not on this list I would really love, but in the end I think it's most useful just to have any decent list and goal and go at it instead of wasting too much time researching and waffling. In that manner, this list was perfect for my needs. Waffling...waffle...wafu...wafter. That's right. If I'm going to have any regrets, I think it'll be only that games like Kud Wafter and Summer Pockets are almost certainly not gonna be translated in the time I have. Can't get enough Key.