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Foreword: Absolutely unknown game in the West that has overwhelmingly positive evaluation in Japan. Which side would I take? Title: Rocket no Natsu Developer: TerraLunar Date: 2002-10-11 VNDB link:https://vndb.org/v4190 Youtube walkthrough:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_HLI2A5oFE&list=PLs4Gp5VU4Fv_3lP089VAcjTRvabUf9dJf Synopsis: There used to be a season called "Rocket summer"... The Earth has become a member of the Galactic Federation and has accepted multiple emissaries from aliens. Silver rockets are launched from the Earth on daily basis, but one day all inter-galaxy contacts cease and space port doors get shut. Main character has dreamt of space travel since childhood. One day he decides to help girl Chise to participate in self-made rocket competition "50 Miles Over". Together with princess from the other star they form a rocket club. Will their dreams come true? Structure: Roughly a month from 05.07 till 06.11 Length: 7 hours for initial route, some 3 hours for each of remaining 4 routes. Plus 3 hours for omake. Game type: Space dream youth comedy with aliens Difficulty: Moderate Character Design rating: 8/10 Protagonist rating: 7/10 Story rating: 8/10 Game quality: 7/10 Overall rating: 7 or 8/10 Rating comments: It's 7 if you have sound stuttering like me and are't crazy about the genre like me. It's 8 for everyone else. Protagonist: Takashi is pretty cool. He's so knowledgeable of rockets and so patient and attentive that I'd happily have same intelligent protagonist everywhere. Characters: There are five heroines which are very different. Chika route is forced as first - and she's the only normal human among all the heroines. She has the only normal route about passion for rocket building and normal romance. But after that surprises begin. There are two routes for each of aliens - Selen-chan and her guard Berthia. Characters are pretty crazy and so are their routes, but it was really sad for me to see ignorant and vain Selen-chan to have teary face in the end. Tsundere should never cry! Haruhi-sensei is... android teacher. And Akira is our normal childhood friend with a huge secret about her - the most shocking route for sure. Story: Main route only covers characters getting together around Chika desire to build a rocket and being joined by aliens. Then each route has its turns. CG: No complaints at all. Sound: Everyone is voiced, including protagonist. That's absolutely superb. But sound stuttering that I got at Win10 really started to kill the fun around the third route I played. Freezes also got more and more frequent, so I did not record past 3rd route. Thoughts: It's the third rocket club theme visual novel that I play, and it's actually the best one of the three. The reason is the variety of routes and only interesting scenes. There's tension that leaves your interested from beginning to the end. Full voicing, bright atmosphere and colorful characters add up to the feeling. Omake about space adventures fits greatly to the picture as well. Overall comments: Game is a masterpiece, no doubt. It's not a breakthrough game to become a pillar of new visual novel world. No, it's just a cosy cool place to visit and have a rest. I guess it's the real reason why it went unnoticed in the West - we need a breakthrough. The Japanese can be jerks about plotge, but they can rarely be wrong about a good calming charage.

Before Dharker Studio became the semi-competent producer of smut we know and (occasionally) love today, its founder, AJ Tilley, made a name for himself through his personal VN publishing brand, AJTilley.com. Throughout 2015 there has been an impressive number of decently-sized games released under that label, the whole endeavour fuelled by a never-ending stream of crowdfunding campaigns, making Tilley one of the most notable creators on the fledgeling EVN scene. At the same time, his activities were spawning increasing controversies, mostly over the appalling quality of some of the games in question and overuse of Kickstarter. In April 2016, after just a year and a half of presence within the EVN scene, the infamy around the label became intense enough that Tilley himself decided to terminate it, removing all of its online presence and transferring all the rights to his company’s “development arm”, Dharker Studio. The "restructured" company then both continued working on the franchises introduced by AJTilley.com and created new ones, including highly successful ecchi VNs such as Negligee or Army Gals, while its creator’s name was conveniently hidden from the public’s eye. Despite the horror stories circulating around these “dark beginnings” of Dharker Studio, the games from that period always interested me quite a lot, both because of my usual, morbid curiosity and the significant role they played in the history of EVNs. While it’s easy to argue that titles like Sword of Asumi or Divine Slice of Life did a lot to reinforce the general impression of EVNs being cheap, awkward imitations of their Japanese predecessors, I wanted to find out whether they’re really as bad as people make them out to be. In today’s episode, I’ll cover four of those pre-Dharker projects – outside of the two mentioned above, I’ll be including Highschool Romance and Highschool Possession, which, amusingly enough, have exactly nothing to do with each other, utilizing drastically different artstyles and telling stories that could hardly be further away from each other, at least apart from the obligatory high school setting. The one game I’ll skip, for the time being, is Beach Bounce, initial episodes of which were published during this time, but which was later heavily reworked and fully released as a “proper” Dharker Studio title, Beach Bounce Remastered. After that, it even spawned its own little franchise – this series, with three VNs in total, deserves a separate look and will be the next topic for Shovelware Adventures. So, going back to our main issue, are the AJTilley.com VNs really that bad? The answer is: no. Because in reality, if you treat them seriously to any extent, they’re even worse than I've expected – at least outside of one, notable exception. Sword of Asumi Imagine a game featuring a female assassin in an alternative-history Japan, where shogunate won the late XIX-century civil war and what in our world was the Meiji restoration followed a different path. The samurai class never lost its dominance, preserving its ethos and prestige till the modern day, while the militaristic government relies on secret police and agents such as our lead, Asumi, to keep people in check. At the same time, a new terrorist group rises, aiming to violently oppose the established order. Sounds pretty cool, right? Only in theory, as the reality of Sword of Asumi is one of the most amazing trainwrecks I’ve seen during my involvement with EVNs, rivalling Winged Cloud’s Legends of Talia with how absurdly stupid and tone-deaf it is. The first thing you might notice after launching the game is that Asumi is possibly the dumbest assassin in the world, spewing edgy one-liners and engaging in small talk with her victims instead of focusing on getting the job done. A moment later, when a member of the Edo's (this universe’s Japan) secret police, a Justicar, shows in the house of Asumi’s latest hit and start discussing extremely delicate details of her next assignment in the middle of the murder scene, you know you’re up for a ride. And be sure, the stream of utter stupidity and inexplicable writing fu**ups never truly ends (like Asumi causally approaching other characters in her assassin’s clothes, while being undercover – I can understand that kind of mistake in writing, but when you can literally see it happening on the screen???). The somewhat-decent romance options, both male and female, help things a tiny bit, but can’t change the overall dreadful quality of the experience. The absurd fanservice (it seems assassins have a strong taste for overly-elaborate, sexy lingerie, especially when preparing for a mission) and the fact how seriously the game treats itself are pretty much the final nails to its coffin. While the likes of Sakura games are after dumb and trashy, they’re self-aware and try to have fun with the formula. In Sword of Asumi, the only fun you can have is the kind fully unintended by its authors: the high from how astonishingly bad and absurd it is. And unless that’s what you’re looking for, there’s really no reason to read it. Sorry Kaori, even you couldn’t save this one... Final Rating: Smelly Poo Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

Navel just annoucned on twitter that they have started working on a direct sequel to Shuffle, "Shuffle, Episode 2." The game's website. (Very bare-bones atm.) As a big fan of Shuffle, I'm pretty hyped about this!

Please don't say culture. That makes it sound like they are from a foreign land. It's just a country like any other.

Rose Guns Days features an alternative Japan after loosing the WW2

Hello, my first post on this forum. I made account just to thank you for your work and ask for update regarding partial patch. I just couldn't wait any longer, so I played until end of Fione chapter with Yantere TL and now I really want to read Eris one ;O I'm so pumped, please don't let my hype die ;V

Got it working actually

What's your OS? Also, do you have the correct patch? https://www.dropbox.com/s/ctwxfx1497bxmck/Kikokugai - Reichin Rinrinshan - English Patch.rar?dl=0 The readme included reads as follows: Japan as system locale and language for non-unicode programs are a given. You might want to reinstall the game if you weren't in JP locale when you installed it. And like Seraphim said, you'll most certainly want to install K-Lite Codec Pack, update .NET Framework, DirectX, etc.

Try setting your system locale to Japanese too, if you haven't already. Some VNs refuse to boot with any other setting. The Steam version of Hoshizora no Memoria wouldn't boot for me unless I used Japanese locale, despite the entire game being in English.

Have you tried all the compatibility options or just one that was suggested? Forcing 640 x 480 resolution or disabling fullscreen optimization might help, if you haven't already tried those. Make sure all your drivers, especially your graphics driver, is up to date, since some strange problems can occur if they're not. There could be some issue with the newest drivers too, though. If you're already running the latest version, you could try reverting to an older one and see if the problem persists. You could also try disconnecting any secondary display you might be using. I've noticed that some VN's have trouble with a multiple monitor setup even if you only have a single one set as active in Windows, so you have to physically disconnect the other ones to bypass this issue. Antivirus and other security software also have a tendency to clash with certain applications, so you could try turning those off.

Plot twist: Protagonist is actually blind

Ekhemmm... As for me - I did read Princess Evangile twice - second time it was to check out All-ages version. I loved it, and whole experience was like coming home, or meeting old friends again. Some day I may revisit it again. And I think that I actually prefer all-ages version. I absolutely loved "morning/cuddling after" CGs for Chiho and Ayaka that were added in this version. I also read Kotori's route in Konosora twice - when I played the game for the first time, I dropped it at Ageha's route, waiting for retranslation, so when the patch came out I read whole thing again. I enjoyed it all the same (or even more because of better TL ). I actually plan to read Konosora for the third time, but this time it will be Japanese all ages version - Cruise Sign.

Oh, that's easy. Those projects aren't "basically finished", and Sekai has terrible project management skills. People will put up with fan patches that are glitchy, require people to install locale support for a language they don't even speak just to run the game, and has a kind of crappy presentation cause the 'patch' is made by hacking the executable so there's lots of little engine issues. People will not put up with that kind of thing from a legit company. The customer base will be like 'what the fuck, dumbasses?' and the licensors may be offended at how poorly their products have been treated. A crappy release like Leyline or Hoshizora does more than just make Sekai look inept. It also tarnishes the reputation of the licensor by association. They aren't likely to be fans of that. Sekai seems to repeatedly suffer from issues that ... to put it charitably... speak to a lack of experience managing IT projects. The sort of trouble Sekai is having is what happens when you have incompetent management. Incompetent rank-and-file employees produce one kind of bad result. Incompetent management produces bad results that are often far worse, and larger scale. Take Leyline for example. 1) Sekai should have known there were untranslated lines in the product. Why didn't they? Because they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: they made a small change after testing was finished. I.e. they shipped an untested build. 2) They should have known better than to ship a game where, if they ever patched the game's script, the engine would delete saves and make people start over. This is a technical limitation they absolutely should have known about. They don't seem to have considered the high likelihood that this engine limitation would vastly complicate their lives. 3) The first two items combine very poorly. Releasing a build that is untested has been known to be playing with fire for a long time. It drastically increases the odds that you're going to have some kind of problem. Hell, this is so well known that in some places I've worked, doing that is grounds for termination. And when you know that, if you do have a problem, it'll be an enormous clusterfuffle to fix it, then you either fix the engine before releasing it, or you be extra super careful to make sure it's perfect before it goes out, so you won't ever have to update it. Here, they decided it would be too much work and delay the project too long to try and rework the engine. (Not without reason; look at how long the delay was once they had no choice but to do it anyway.) That's ... not exactly 'fine', but sometimes you have to go with the least bad option among your bad choices. But then they did something that increased the odds that something would be wrong with the scripts. Something that's widely known to be a terrible idea. Or take Hoshizora or Chrono Clock. Both of these games shipped with localization issues severe enough they decided to redo it. Well, how did that happen? How did this not get caught much earlier in the process? It would have been a lot cheaper and quicker to catch these issues after (say) 5% of the game text was done.