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@Fiddle GODDAMMIT YOU STOLE MY JOKE!! welcome and such.

Oh, right, I ran into a weird glitch in Higurashi. All of a sudden, a second Keiichi popped up. Made it kinda hard to take the scene seriously!

Yup, that's the plan! I've been putting it off for years just because people recommended playing Higurashi first due to there supposedly being some shared elements or something. I don't really know any details, but I guess I'll find out soon enough. I've seen a spoiler about Umineko containing but I'm hoping that's something that's present from early on, like in Higurashi, rather than some game-changing reveal towards the end of the story. Other than that, I've managed to dodge any information about Umineko, so it's basically a blank slate for me. I've also started reading Raging Loop whenever I'm not reading Higurashi. I'm not usually a very big fan of werewolves, but it works well in this case and the story is pretty intense and engrossing right off the bat. My main concern is that my brain might overheat from the Higurashi + Raging Loop Mystery Combo Attack, so maybe I should start considering something like this:

Chapter 5 of Higurashi = done. I'm hoping for some jaw-dropping reveals in the upcoming chapters! Three more to go.

I'm, strangely enough, in the process of slowly going through Katawa Shoujo for the first time... But I'm already pretty sure nothing's going to beat Hanako route for me, and Hanako as a heroine. While I think Lily's is plenty enjoyable, it just didn't have the same impact and strong theme. Seeing parts of Shizune's route now, I like its flow and the kind of ambivalent character Shizune herself is. I wonder if something is going to make me hate her like so many people do later on...

I've been making my own visual novels for a few years. I got interested in them after playing Ace Attorney back in 2013 and I found I couldn't stop playing them. So, a lot of what I played in the past several years have been visual novels. And after playing so many, I ended up wanting to make my own and I've actually made a few! (https://conorhehr.weebly.com/games.html) Also I like cats.

Anyone loves katawa shoujo? Wich favorite character? I love so much Lilly because she's my first route and my first happy ending. I've found very interesting her story, maybe not the best, but very similar to my personal life ♥ Thank you everybody will answer

Welcome and i love cats and catsgirls to I have 2 cats myself, their name are Flekken and Nusse. I love them very much

Yes. :3

Yes, I love the game. In fact, I’m currently using the Japanese translation as my first serious attempt to read in Japanese. I’m not sure if it’s fine to read translations instead of Japanese VNs for actual learning of the language though. I hate to break it for most people, but I actually prefer Shizune over Hanako, perhaps because I finished Hanako’s route with her bad ending, which to be honest, was actually more interesting than her good ending, and also because she embodied in my mind the kind of personality I don’t want to have nor see in people I would meet. I’m not sure what did you found appealing of her, but for me, it felt much like I was a psychologist rather than a boyfriend, up to the point I seriously wanted to end this quickly, no matter the cost. In short, she’s a awesome friend and a terrible girlfriend. Regarding Shizune, I guess you need to finish the route in order to understand her. Unlike Hanako, you are supposed to learn to love yourself in order to love Shizune, which is essentialy the opposite people often expect for other heroines. I believe people fail to bond with other people because they hate themselves. Aside from Shzune, and Emi to a certain extent, no other route actually pointed this. For me, feeling in an equal relationship feels better than healing the other in my relationship. However, this is just my opinion. I don’t expect people to suddenly change their minds, to be honest. I have a headcanon regarding her unpopularity, but it requires spoilers to understand it, so I will end my rant here.

It's not the best way but if you are really determined try using an HEX editor and shift bits so maybe text will finally appear.

Umineko's is way less impactful than Higurashi's. While the latter restarts everything in each chapter, in Umineko the story goes on through each chapter.

Higurashi.

As for my favourite routes and heroines - definitely Hanako and Lily. I also loved the atmosphere created by soundtrack.

From the first time I played Katawa Shoujo I completely fell in love with the Novel, it has a touch that I cannot find in any other, of course I admit that it is not the best novel that has been created but I have no doubts that it is my Favorite Novel. I think Lilly's route is the best, since our character gets a much deeper and more significant relationship with Lilly than with any of the other girls, and we are also shown that he is willing to risk his life for Lilly, which we do not see. at another time.

Just came by to say that I'm loving your spoiler-free impressions of the story. Keep on going, I think the answers are pretty satisfying, although they may not be what you'd expect. Oh, and play Umineko after it. It is even better than Higurashi.

I'm reading it and I feel terrible not being able to read your spoilers, but I shall persevere. The art is gourgeous, but I think the soundtrack is where thisi game really stands out. I stop reading for a minute or two every time a different track starts playing. The only thing I'm diisliking is how the MC constantly says he is worthless, a nobody, etc etc. He does that every few minutes, and it seems pointless. He has friends, a house, a cat... seems fine to me.

I'll add a couple of examples to that "dissolve everything" that you don't really realize until you start working in a visual novel yourself. First is the position of your dialogue and characters. In the past I thought that a lot of Visual Novels were still 800x600 just because they didn't know better, but that's not the main reason. The wider your resolution is, the more separated each of your elements in your novel will become. You need to get your text a lot higher that what you may think in the first place if you want the reader to be able to read and see the change on the sprites while reading. Check it yourselves, pick any VN with a good resolution, and compared where the dialogue box is compared to those at 800x600. You will suddenly notice how there a huge gap between the bottom of the screen and where the text start. Sometimes a smaller resolution makes everything easier for the eye when it comes to focusing your eyes to the screen. Having the text going from one character to another is not as easy as just "changing the color of the name". When you read your own text is easy to know who's talking because you did it, but give it to someone else and he will probably have issues to know when someone is talking, destroying the entire flow of dialogues by a making him look for the name everytime. Reality is no one reads the name box and it's just there as support so you need to avoid this. The main trick most visual novels use for this are sound for dialogue, let it be voice actors or just beps like in the Ace Attorney series, or get sprites to the side of the box so that way you can know who is talking by the side of your eye. This is specially important when there are a couple character on screen, or if your main character has no sprites so dialogues don't get mixed. There are other techniques like making your sprites go darker when they are not talking, change the color of the boxes, make the boxes appear at different parts of the screen depending who's talking, etc... Dissolving everything makes everything goes smoother, that's for sure, but at the same time it changes the flow of the of the dialogue compared to normal books A LOT. Now you suddenly have small stops of 0.5 seconds everytime a new character talks. This is not of a big problem most of the time, but there are moments you need your text to be fast or at least get quick reactions from your characters for a bigger impact. In this sense writting a visual novel is completly different to a normal book and you must look for ways to make it don't lose quality or impact with your own words. There's also some techniques like adding sound effects, shake effects, or transitions on the screen to develop this impact in different ways. Talking about sound effects. They are not as important as you think. Never. In fact, having too many sound effects will even ridicule your text. If you pay attention to movies or anime you will see that a lot of times the sound effects used for some acctions have nothing to do with what the sound would actually be in real life, but again, it's more important to get an emotional or acction-reaction effect from the sfx that everything else. For Visual Novels this makes the sound effects to be less important since the actions and reactions are usually narrated and you won't have many scenes that require this effect. So don't get too frustated to get good sound effects, your music and your text are a million times more important. And I'll leave it like that for now.