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Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/17/20 in all areas

  1. GXOALMD

    What are you playing?

    By combining my knowledge of how storytelling works with my knowledge of how spoilers work, I've most likely inferred an appropriate hint: shit goes down.
    3 points
  2. Ds-sans is a British VN developer whose work I've been following since the times I started writing my blog, first being charmed by his free romance game Sounds of Her Love, (check out my review of it here). Released on Steam March 2017, this very tame and heartwarming, small love story was extremely by-the-numbers and rather cliched, but stood out through its solid execution and likeable heroine. Later, I’ve checked out this author’s first VN, Lost Impressions, which also proved enjoyable despite being something of a mess visually and including edgy story elements typical for many beginner VN writers – a rather standard amateur project, but showing traces of genuine talent. As you can imagine, I was quite interested in reading ds-sans’ first commercial VN, Chemically Bonded, announced and successfully crowdfunded in late 2017. It promised to continue the wholesome, romantic climate of Sounds of Her Love, but with a more in-depth, branching story and better production values – pretty much a product catered exactly to someone like me, who enjoys fluffy slice-of-life content in VNs over pretty much everything else. After a full year of delays, the game finally came out on November 2019, proving to be… Very much a mixed bag. But, what could go wrong with a concept this straightforward and such a promising background? Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
    1 point
  3. I think that worldbuilding in most media has two main challenges and how they deal with them decides whether I'd consider them successful. The first is keeping the world believable and consistent – you'll notice that most media, especially the relatively short-form ones such as movies and animation, don't really give a shit about this aspect. The worlds they create won't survive any kind of deeper scrutiny and they rely a lot on the suspension of disbelief and the watchers/readers not caring about smaller details. Also, if something is made into a longer series, there's a good chance it will destroy its own lore and rules of its world for the sake of convenience – look at Mass Effect for example, with the third part ignoring tons of pre-established events and lore. Or the new Star Wars trilogy for some extreme self-mutilation of a fictional universe. Thus, actual effort being put into creating a consistent world is something I very much appretiate. The second part is the delivery of the information, which in literature and VNs has a unique risk of turning into massive infodumps – after all, you have all the time in the world to throw in a few tomes of encyclopedia between the story events to make sure the player doesn't get lost. And If the writers really suck, it might also become the Awkward Expository DialogueTM, which can easily become even more unreadable than plain infodumps. Building up your fictional world without using either of those two "techniques", but through natural-feeling events and conversations is hard, but definitely most satisfying. And having said all this, one game that I think did some really cool stuff in this regard and that will not get brought up by anyone else is Sable's Grimoire. It's all about worldbuilding and does its best to convey it all through the protagonist's and heroines' stories, rather than just bombarding you with textbook-like excerpts. And it has some really, really cool elements to its modern-fantasy setting.
    1 point
  4. adamstan

    What are you playing?

    Hmm... how to say it without being too spoilery... there's more to this VN than SoL and romance. It kind of reminds me of first episode of Sailor Moon - you have your SoL, and then suddenly strange things start to happen, or, as @GXOALMD has put it - shit goes down
    1 point
  5. I already mentioned Aokana, but if talking about VNs I read in 2019 (instead of 2019 releases), it falls to second place, and my absolutely favourite read of 2019 would be Mashiro Iro Symphony.
    1 point
  6. Aokana was my favorite by far,i absolutely loved it. edit.i also really enjoyed Hoshi ori in 2019.
    1 point
  7. I read so much good stuff last year, it's pretty much impossible for me to just choose one favorite in particular. When it comes to VNs actually released in 2019, it's a battle between AI: The Somnium Files, Chaos;Child, Damekoi and Bokuten. I considered putting Aokana here too, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations so I'm choosing to omit it from the list. If I have to to pick one of those, I think I'd go with AI: The Somnium Files. It's the only one out of the four that I went into completely blind, and it turned out to be a really great experience with a well-balanced mix of both humor and seriousness. As for VNs that were released earlier but I read in 2019, it's even more difficult to pick a winner. I'd say it's either 999, Chaos;Head, Kazoku Keikaku, Symphonic Rain, Narcissu, YU-NO, Little Busters or Acting Lessons. I'm kinda leaning towards Symphonic Rain, because that was the first one that came to mind when I started racking my brain over this. The soundtrack is amazing, and there's something special about the overall ambience of the game. I have yet to reread a single VN, but Symphonic Rain is one of my top candidates for when it eventually happens.
    1 point
  8. adamstan

    What are you playing?

    Amber Quartz already managed to surprise me pretty hard When you read vndb summary and look at screenshots and (non-spoilery) tags, it looks like just another nakige/charage, focused on the themes of group of friends, memories, etc etc. And the beginning of the game seems to confirm this - it starts similarly to many other high-school romances. Also, just in line with summary, we see some of the MC's flashbacks from seven years ago, when he was playing with his group of friends, from whom he's been estranged later on. And now they (a bit unexpectedly) meet again. So far, pretty typical setup, and I actually liked it. But then they That was totally unexpected, but now I am really curious what happens next. Also, I love character designs - they have that classic 90s anime style. BTW it seems to be pretty obscure VN, with only 18 votes on vndb, and, if memory serves, something like ~380 on EGS.
    1 point
  9. I had someone ask me why I consider some VN battle scenes to be good and others to be low quality just the other day, and I thought I would address this here. First, I should state that while visuals definitely have an effect on the quality of a battle scene, the quality of visuals is less than 15% of the reasons why I pick one VN's battle scenes over another's. The considerations when it comes to visuals are raw quality (artist skill, detail, etc), number of combat-related CGs and sprites, and the quality of the visual effects. More important (roughly 25% of the whole) is music and sound effects. It is quite possible to turn a VN whose visuals are mediocre and writing are good into a masterpiece based solely on how the BGMs and sound effects are used. I've seen it happen (Devils Devel Concept being a prime example), and I can honestly say that this aspect almost always trumps visuals when it comes to determining the quality of a given battle scene. Another 25% comes from context and presentation. I split this evenly because these two factors tend to be inter-dependent in battle scenes. Without the context, you can't tell whether you should care, and presentation (the art of bringing writing, sound, and visuals together to create a collaborative effect on the reader) quality can dramatically alter how you see the battle. The last 35% is all writing. My prejudice would have put it at 50%, but realistically, in a VN, writing is at the very least 35% of what determines the quality of a battle scene. The very simple reason is that making a battle scene interesting requires an eye for detail, for stringing descriptions of character actions, emotions, and words into a cohesive whole. There are plenty of writers outside of the VN industry who only do this well and literally are incapable of 'peaceful writing'. That is because what is demanded of writing during a battle scene is fundamentally different from what is demanded outside of battle scenes. To be blunt, most VN writers have no idea of how to write a battle scene, which is why the good ones stand out so much. 'Tom blasted magic sword at Dave, Dave took it on his shield with a grunt' is about as far as it goes with most VN battle scenes... and that is fairly horrid, since there is no sense of what is actually going on in that exchange. It isn't uncommon for VN makers with unskilled writers to simply substitute visual and sound effects for descriptions of the battle simply because the writer can only handle dialogue and minimal or copy-paste action lines. However, this results in amazingly boring scenes, since there is usually almost no variation in visual or sound effects from scene to scene, action to action. This means that they are essentially using a square block for a round peg. I don't know how many third-rate battle scenes I've fallen asleep to over the years... Anyway, ideally, a good battle scene should have all the elements come together in one cohesive whole. However, in practice, that almost never happens. About the only companies that have ever managed to do that consistently are Nitroplus, Light, and Propeller... and we all know what happened to Propeller and (more recently) Light.
    1 point
  10. Clannad, Little Busters, Grisaia, and Majikoi were all fantls before the companies bought the finished or nearly-finished product. Essentially, rather than paying in advance for something that might take years to finish, they payed for something that just needed to be polished and could potentially be released sooner with less expense in the long run.
    1 point
  11. Are we talking about 2019 releases, or the things we played in 2019? If it's about 2019 releases, then for me it's definitely Aokana.
    1 point
  12. With two tsunderes and one kuudere, it's hard to see how you missed To Heart 2 (unless you just didn't like it.)
    1 point
  13. I finally reached 2000 tracks last week…woo hoo! Not too bad considering I started the site with 100 tracks. Anyhow, I’m a bit under the weather this week…(back probs…ugh)…but I did manage to create a few new music tracks for everyone…free to use with attribution: On my Fantasy 10 page: FARAWAY WORLDS CALLING – (Looping) – Ready to go? On my Chiptunes 3 page: ARCADE GOBLINS – (Looping) – Running around Pixeltown, causing chaos. I’d love to hear this in a 2D arcade-style game. Fun stuff! And on my Nature / Science 3 page: EXPEDITION NORTH – (Looping) – Embarking for the frozen wilderness. This track might sound nice under the title screens of an adventure game. In case you’re wondering, attribution information is here: If you happen to use some of my assets in your projects, please feel free to share (if you wish.) I love to see how creative people are using my work! soundimage.org
    1 point
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