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I've added Seisai no Resonance to my Short List of Yuri VNs I'm Writing Into Every Localisation Survey Without Any Hope It'll Actually Lead to AnythingTM.

Oh sweet, I managed to make it through Unlimited, the Shuckle Pokemon that told me about bad news must've reverse psychology'd me or something so I didn't really find it a slog to read as much as Extra was. Not much to say about Unlimited, it was more enjoyable for me than Extra with its more "serious" tone but it's basically the same generic high school harem 'cept with mecha sci-fi military the world's ending!!@# elements thrown in to keep things interesting. Kind of missed Sumika, never thought I'd say that l0l ..Well, now it's time to see what all the Alternative hype is all about..

You can't go wrong with PersonA ~Opera Za no Kaijin~.

Oh yes, I'd love to see that translated. One of my favorite games. I'm also just getting started on a re-play of Beat Valkyrie Ixseal, and I'm reminded how much I love the Beat series from Alice Soft. Hoping MG will do Ixseal some day, after they release Escalayer.

So I've finished several VN's - time to drop a few words about them. First on the list is Hatsukoi 1/1 which I was playing for quite some time now. It's a slice-of-life VN, so I had to consume it in smaller doses while reading other VN's as well. So it took a while to finish, even if I only played Maya's, Kyou's and Midori's routes. Overall, I think this VN kinda clicked with me. While it wasn't super special, I think the characters had a good chemistry with each other and the whole cafeteria stuff turned out to be more entertaining than expected. I also appreciate that you had two male buddies to hang around with, which weren't just idiots - reminded me a bit of Da Capo 2. They offered a refreshing change of pace to the cafeteria commitee with the girls. Heroine routes felt a bit too long and overdramatized though. I had the impression that if they would have cut the last third of each route, the VN would have been better for it. The protagonist could occasionally get a bit annoying, but on the other hand he shows some remarkable growth in some routes, especially Midori's. Heroine ranking: Maya > Kyou > Midori > Runa > Yukino Overall rating: 6.5/10 I was even thinking about granting it a 7, but decided against since it was lacking a certain something that would make it stand out, like Aokana or the 9-Nine series. Still, it's a decent slice-of-life VN. So the next one on the list one is a quite unusual one for my standards: Koutetsu no Majo Annerose. Me playing a Lilith title is certainly something that doesn't happen every day, and this will probably also stay an exception. Usually, their H-content is far too extreme for me, but on the other hand they have some interesting settings and cool adult heroine designs. Lilith are one of the rare companies that somehow managed to distance themselves from generic school life moege and still be successful with it. It's a pity that they just waste their potential for fetish nukiges. Annerose is a bit of an exception since it has a male protagonist and at least half of its H-content is just vanilla. The majority of the more extreme content is optional in bad endings or you get a choice to avoid it. It's also rather plot heavy to a point that I wouldn't call it a nukige anymore. There's a reason why it's the highest rated Lilith VN on VNDB. The story was certainly quite refreshing. You're pretty much captured and killed during a slave raid by the Steel Witch Annerose and cursed into her undying slave servant. During the course of the game, you're slowly ascending from a useless lackey to a powerful and reliable partner of Annerose. The plot is about finding the truth about an evil cyber-werewolf running amok in the city and killing lots of people. This is also a true cyberpunk setting with fantasy elements almost like Shadowrun. You've evil cons, street-samurai, assassins, gangs, zombies and all kinds of shady people to interact with. And not to forget, a school girl equipped with a fully armed machine pistol which she uses on almost EVERY occasion against EVERYONE around her out of fear of rapists, making her one of the most dangerous persons in the city. XD I really liked the more 'feme fatal' character designs and the overall anarchic and violent cyberpunk atmosphere. Riku also made a good team with Annerose and Michiko. Music was also decent, but it was a bit annoying that the VN didn't use its full 800 x 600 resolution. Heroine ranking: Annerose > Mayfeng > Ray > Michiko > Miki Overall rating: 7/10 The VN wasn't too long and for its length it offered enough content to keep me entertained. I also appreciate that it was possible for the most part to avoid the more extreme content. It's a pity that Lilith stopped compromising and just produced plain hardcore fetish nukiges since then - what a waste of potential! So this will most likely stay the only Lilith VN I'm reading. So, the last on the list is Baldr Sky Dive, the VN with the most potential and that 'should' have been the best on my list. Just that it's not. But let's start with the good things first. The VN looks surprisingly good for such an old title. The effects were smooth and the character designs still look decent enough. They also used such a good text font that they didn't need a text box, so even if it was just 800 x 600, at least you could see all of it. Every VN should have that. Music was okay, some soundtracks better some worse. I wasn't interested in the gameplay and therefore set it to very easy, and it really was easy to breeze through in that mode, which was nice. Now to the not so great things. The VN consists of three core themes, a cyberpunk world of the present, a school life episode of the past and mecha for the fights. Unfortunately, none of the three themes complement each other very well. It's more the opposite, the whole thing would have been better if the writers would have focused on one theme and skipped the others. Instead of trying to establish the cyberpunk world as good as possible, the VN lost itself constantly in school life back-blendings, with most of them completetly irrelevant to what's currently happening in the present. It would have been better to just make a separate 'MuvLuv Extra' out of it, which you could just finish for good first. It's also odd to have a heroine route where the protagonist is constantly hitting on other girls, even if it is just in back-blendings. Overall the first 2/3 of the route had literally no story flow at all because of the constant interruptions. Only in the last third it got a bit better. Another problem is the mecha theme. It's actually not just a game for the reader it's also a game in the VN because it's purely restricted to its virtual reality. It's pretty much just like League of Legends in our world - even kids play it. The only thing that differs is that you can switch it to fatal mode in certain regions. But besides that, it could also just be a Tetris contest. That means that the whole military background like sweaty mechanics, repairs and conflicts with all kinds of other troop types is missing. This is NOT a mecha VN like MuvLuv, it's a cyberpunk VN where the hacking part was realized with some nice mecha combat. The whole 'mercenary group' stuff with military titles was just silly since they were actually just hacker groups. But it's even worse, because since all conflicts were played out with the mecha gameplay, the entire armed conflicts of the real cyberpunk world were missing. It's ironic that just the two antagonists Gregory and Gilbert got the idea to make an (incredible successful) attack outside of cyberspace. The protagonist itself never got that idea and tried to solve every conflict via mecha combat. The plot itself stays minimal and almost doesn't progress at all. Gray Christmas gets mentioned hundreds of times and even if it's pretty clear from the start what happened, they try to strech even the most basic information through most of the route. They tried to bring up some pseudo intellectual themes like designer childs or living Ai's but barely knew what to do with them. The antagonists were completely forgettable and just your typical unlikable 'Muahahaha...' types, easily recognizable as just that from a mile away. It's remarkable how they could stretch so one-dimensional characters to two dimensions. The plot in the actual present also only involves just about 5 - 10 characters, since half of the cast only appears in back blendings. Drawn support characters pretty much don't exist, neither in CG backgrounds nor as sprites. Most 'factions' are just represented by their leader. Their troops are handled mainly as mechs. As compensation they used Sora's sprite for pretty much everything. Overall I'd only advise this title to people who are really interested in the gameplay. If you just want an interesting story you won't find it here. The first route took me over 30 hours and from that probably 5 hours at most had any plot relevance with the rest just being painfully boring filler scenes. So I'll leave it at that. Even a short VN like Annerose did a much better job at showcasing a convincing cyberpunk world with all its grey tones - what a disappointment! Heroine rankings: Sora > Rain > Aki > Don't care Overall rating: 5/10

Confession: One of my very bad hobbies is following various conflicts and political development in the Middle East, and getting pointlessly agitated about some of them. So, today I wanted to find a bit more info on a very important thing happening in Iraq, that is the attempts to form a new cabinet under Muhammad Allawi. Not finding much on Iraq Livemap, I've started looking for related subreddits, in hope some of them have fresh reports on what's going on. My findings were: /Iraq, 6.4k subscribers, half-dead. /MiddleEast, 1,6k subscribers, dead. /MiddleEastNews, 10k, somewhat alive but nothing on the topic yet. And next on the search list was... /MiddleEasternHotties, 106k members. Nice to be reminded where the internet's priorities truly lie.

Nice one! Dergonu brought it up before but I hadn't thought of it. I'll steal that.

I just went purely by how I liked the heroines from the parts I read. If you've read the whole thing, you've probably a way better picture of the heroines. Originally, I had Rain in front, but towards the end of the first route her endless whining got so on my nerves that I switched off her voice and she dropped to second place in popularity. lol

https://vndb.org/v15563

After having just looked up the definition of "otome," I see that yours is technically correct, but I nevertheless insist that you shill Hadaka Shitsuji 2 as hard as I intend to.

I'm fairly sure there's some sort of conflict in our definitions of 'Otome'.

Oh, that is wonderful. I'm actually specifically looking for professionally made (or at least professional in appearance) novels I can read in one evening.

There is a comment on Steam that states it's 2~3 hours long

NP5 lvl 96 Fujinon... I love Fujinon... haa haa... Edit: And no, I didn't just use summon tickets (though I blew through thirty of those)... I broke down and bought enough SQ to get me there, since I love Fujinon both in the game and in KnK... best clairvoyant telekinetic serial killer ever...

That used to be my mindset as well, and it kinda ruins the value of which route you prefer. When I pick up this VN in the near future, I'll only chose one girl based on how attached I become to them.