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EDIT: Due to Fuwa anti-piracy rules this thread's usefulness was quite limited, since we couldn't ask for any files that we needed for further compatibility testing and the like. I'd say even posting direct links to our patch here was questionable to begin with, since it's not that different from the abovementioned files that we were asking for. So in the end we decided to remove all links from here and move our main release thread to Reddit: LINK That's where all further updates will be posted, so make sure to follow us there. I'll ask mods to lock this thread, since MeruP won't be checking it anyway, so all feedback should be posted on Reddit instead (we also have a dedicated thread for reporting bugs and other issues).

MAITETSU 18+ DEMOSAIC STEAM AND FAKKU PATCH Did you mistake the quote "100% DRM free and completely uncut with no scenes removed" as "TOTALLY UNCENSORED!"? Do you hate to see squares in beautiful art? Are you from the golden era (JAST USA, Peach Princess, G-Collections) and expected from an localized eroge to get an fully uncut, uncensored and without mosaics game? ... Then this patch is for you. You read it right, the patch does what it says. It removes the mosaic in hscenes from the beautiful artwork. Original MAITETSU 18+ Fakku edition -> you can buy it at the official page: https://www.fakku.net/games/maitetsu-english -> PLEASE SUPPORT english localization by buying the game ! OR BUY FROM STEAM Maitetsu 18+ Release Restoration Patch - FOR STEAM OR BANDAID removal PATCH + restoration patch - FOR FAKKU 1. [Q]: Is it legit? [A]: I can't believe it myself either. But YES! It is real and it does what it says. Try it before reporting or commenting. Thank you. 2. [Q]: Where are the hscenes? I can't find them in the game? [A]: There are no hscenes in the common route, except provoking pictures which the Maitetsu 18+ Release Restoration Patch restores and the actual hscenes won't trigger by default, but during a heroine route, a message will popup at bottom right side of the screen saying that you gain access to a hscene, then you have to manually open the hscene in the menu. It is a game design, not a bug or glitch, it is how LOSE company makes the games. Rarely you will gain access for hscenes during a route, most hscenes are unlocked AFTER finishing the game with that particular heroine. 3. [Q]: When does the DLC hscenes show up? [A]: After you complete the previous hscenes, the DLC hscenes will eventually show up. 4. [Q]: STEAM support? [A]: At the moment I don't own the STEAM version so I can't test it and I don't know if it works. If someone can help me I will make an steam support patch, but you would still need the FAKKU 18+ DLC patch. 5. [Q]: Can we see some screenshot/examples of patch? [A]: Because of the nature of the game as being an loli game I can't post pictures because of the policy of the forum. But if someone wants to see the results before buying the actual game I can send you 2 example pictures. Just send a PM and I will reply with those 2 example pictures. Examples of non-loli characters are in the gallery section. 6. [Q] : What was changed in the new Fakku edition? What's the difference between the OLD and NEW download? [A]: Jacob from fakku has a good description -> https://www.fakku.net/forums/games/maitetsu-fixes-and-updates .Everything written in the section "what has not changed" WAS already fixed already by heliosaurus by his patch and the same fix is present in the new "BANDAID removal PATCH + restoration patch" 7. [Q] Why is there a difference in size between Heliosaurus Restoration patch and "BANDAID removal PATCH + restoration patch" Both patches work perfectly fine and shouldn't have any problems. You can use Heliosaurus on the OLD and NEW version but the BANDAID patch is only for new FAKKU download ONLY. But... the original restoration patch includes fixes which are already fixed in the new version of FAKKU's edition and the BANDAID removal patch just removes this fixes from the PATCH to be less in size. The reason why you could still use the original restoration patch on the old and new version of fakku is that technically the patch is in original form a "patch.xp3" which contains mostly PICTURES! Yes, pictures. And it just replaces those pictures from the original data files which are located in "data.xp3" / "emotedx.xp3", and so on. The KiriKiri engine works like that. When FIRST run, it loads first files from, data.xp3, and all the main xp3, and then LOADS patch.xp3, patch2.xp3, patch3.xp3... and so on. That's why we don't need external programs to patch the original data files, and we can put everything in PATCH.XP3, or PATCH2.XP3, and so on. You can literally replace the whole game with a single PATCH.xp3 file. The restoration patch was made by using resource files from the JAPANESE version and replaces the resource files from the ENGLISH version. So the original restoration patch just OVERWRITES fixes-pictures present in the MAIN game from the NEWEST fakku edition download.... 8.[Q]: That isn't the game we were promised / it is disappointing / don't want to buy the game .... [A]: Well, it isn't a question, I just want to express my opinion... I understand that the release a disappointment, and like everyone, even I would wanted a TOTALLY uncut and uncensored version. I hate the CUTS in western releases, but that was going on for decades not just in VN's look in the old days of SNES games with JRPGS. And in east they get the same results with some western games... Thanks to that, we have two types of ppl - one who are complaining and the the other one who are making uncut/undub/uncensored version of games, from snes to psp/psvita and so on. What I mean is that you shouldn't lose energy in complaining on fakku and denpasoft/sekai, yes even sekai. I understand that sekai don't take releases seriously but at least we got the translated version, whish is a huge WORK. And be thankful, we got "OMG!" Maitetsu! I can't expect newcomers and the ones on fakku to stop complaining ( and I am not saying that you have to start editing, and join the community of moders, but you are always welcome to join ), but at least you at fuwanovel you have no more reasons to complain. At the end you got the complete 1:1 japanese uncut release with english text, and even a little more, with the demosaic patch ( which in the japanese edition they don't have ). .... please ask questions and I will put most common questions and answers here ... STATUS : COMPLETE ! ALL SCENES MOSAIC-FREE ! Hachiroku's Route Hibiki's Route Paulette's Route Reina's Route Fukami's Route Nagi's Route Kisaki's Route Makura's Route FOR STEAM USE: HELIOSAURUS PATCH for STEAM FOR FAKKU USE: HELIOSAURUS PATCH for FAKKU or down below the BANDAID removal patch 1. Just extract the file patch2.xp3 from the ZIP file in the main maitetsu folder! !! the patch2.xp3, should be in the same folder as the Restoration patch (patch.xp3) and the Maitetsu.exe file. !!! 07/23 - Released the patch with the 5th scene included, and fixes the bug in Hscene 2 07/24 - Released the patch with the included 6th scene 07/25 - Released the patch with the included 7th scene 07/26 - Released the patch with the 8th scene included 07/27 - Hachiroku's Route COMPLETED!!!! 07/28 - Released the patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 01 without mosaic! 07/29 - Released the patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 02 without mosaic! 07/30 - Released the patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 03 without mosaic! 07/31 - Released the patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 04 without mosaic! 08/02 - Released the addon patch with Hibiki's HSCENE 05 without mosaic, you still need the OLD "Maitetsu 18+ Demosaic Patch 7-31-2018" patch. In your folder you should have patch.xp3 (bandaid fix), patch2.xp3 (old 7-31 patch) and patch3.xp3 (this new addon patch) 08/03 - HIBIKI's ROUTE COMPLETED !!! 08/04 - Paulette's new hscene released! 08/05 - Paulette's new hscene released! (Hint: This is the new release which includes HSCENE 03. Skipped Hscene 02 because here isn't any mosaic! Hence the name v0.3 - which represent the hscene completed ) 08/06 - Paulette's new hscene released! 08/07 - Paulette's new hscene released! 08/08 - Paulette's new hscene released! 08/09 - Paulette's new hscene released! 08/10 - PAULETTE's ROUTE COMPLETED !!! 08/11 - Reina's new hscene released! 08/12 - Reina's new hscene released! 08/13 - Reina's new hscene released! 08/14 - REINA's ROUTE COMPLETED !!! 08/15 - Fukami's new hscene released! 08/16 - Fukami's new hscene released! 08/17 - Fukami's new hscene released! 08/18 - Fukami's new hscene released! 08/19 - FUKAMI's ROUTE COMPLETED !!! 08/20 - Nagi's new hscene released! 08/21 - Nagi's ROUTE COMPLETED !!! 08/22 - Kisaki's new hscene released! 08/23 - Kisaki's new hscene released! 08/24 - Kisaki's ROUTE COMPLETED !!! 08/25 - Makura's new hscene released! 08/26 - Makura's new hscene released! 08/27 - COMPLETE PATCH released! Mosaic removed from all scenes! 08/30 - COMPLETE STEAM PATCH released! Mosaic removed from all scenes in STEAM FINALLY!!!! Complete FAKKU Patch ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| COMPLETE PATCH Maitetsu 18+ Demosaic Patch - v0.9a.7z Installation guide: - if you have downloaded the partial update - patch3.xp3 just manually delete it ( you don't need it anymore because its already inside the complete patch! ) ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Complete STEAM Patch ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Maitetsu 18+ Demosaic Steam Patch - v0.9a.7z ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ThugShiro - mega big thanks to ThugShiro. He donated the Steam Version! BIG THANKS TO marcus-beta - with his tremendous help he found out the problem and fixed it, without him there wouldn't be a steam patch! Ulysses - big thanks to Ulysses, without his tools ( https://github.com/UlyssesWu/FreeMote/releases ) this wouldn't be possible. Tools used: PsbDecompile - for decompiling PSBs, PsBuild - for rebuilding back to PSBs FreeMoteViewer - to view rebuilded PSBs (after PsBuild) number201724 - of course, also big thanks to number201724 for the psbtools https://github.com/number201724/psbfile/releases Tools used: emote_conv - decode and encode psb file Heliosaurus - special thanks to the master of the Restoration patch and his helpful guiding SPECIAL extra patch: BANDAID removal PATCH + restoration patch integrated into a single patch ( patch.xp3 ) For the newest FAKKU edition and STEAM! 08/1 - Released the BANDAID removal PATCH + restoration patch integrated Restorationa Patch ( as PATCH.xp3 ) 09/20 - Released the BANDAID removal PATCH + restoration patch for STEAM ( as PATCH.xp3 ) Optional download ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| FAKKU edition Maitetsu 18+ Restoration & Bandaid Removal Patch.7z ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| STEAM edition Maitetsu 18+ Restoration & Bandaid Removal Steam Patch.7z ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ANY COMMENTS, MEANINGFUL CRITICS, GRATITUDE, ADVICE, SUGGESTION RELATED TO THE PATCH ARE HELPFUL. THANK YOU VERY MUCH! Want to support the project?

The Western VN fandom has long idolised the Japanese VN market. Before the recent growth of the EVN scene and official localisations, Western VN fans had to subsist only on the occasional fan-translations of Japanese VNs while being told how much better the untranslated VNs were. However this faith in untranslated VNs rested on an unspoken assumption: that Western and Japanese VN fans enjoy the same content. But is it true? Through comparing the largest VN fandom site in Japan (erogamescape) against the largest VN fandom site in the West (VNDB), we sought to find out. Do we love the same VNs? While the ability of a numerical rating to summarise a subjective experience (like reading a VN) is debatable, the average score a community assigns a VN provides a useful approximation of how highly esteemed that VN is within the community. Both EGS and VNDB allow users to rate VNs they’ve read, so comparing how the same VN scores on both sites gives us an impression of how much the communities agree on which VNs are best. We can see there’s a strong correlation between the score a VN gets on each site, especially for higher rated VNs, showing that both communities tend to agree on which VNs are considered “the best” (despite the ferocious arguments within each fandom over that same question). But as the score drops, so does the agreement over the VN score. So while both communities tend to agree on what’s good, we disagree on what’s bad. There’s also another trend that’s a little less noticeable, but becomes more apparent if we remove the untranslated VNs... While the untranslated VNs in the last graph seemed to fairly evenly straddle the equal score line, the translated VNs are frequently below it (meaning these VNs score higher on EGS than VNDB). But is the translation a cause or an effect of the lower score on VNDB (i.e. does the release of a translation lower the score on VNDB, or are only low-scoring VNs being translated)? To answer this, we tracked how the VNDB score of a VN changes immediately after a translation is released. We tracked 117 of the most popular Japanese VNs that had an English translation released in the past 5 years. In the first 60 days after their translation was released, their score dropped an average of 0.146 on VNDB, with Fata Morgana being the blip on the far right that significantly bucked the trend and increased in score. There also seems to be slight correlation with lower-rated VNs on EGS dropping more than higher-rated ones. So it seems confirmed that the translations are the cause rather than an effect. But why does this happen? This remains the subject of fierce debate among my friends, but we came up with a few theories: Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. The high barrier of entry for a Westerner to read an untranslated VN (they have to know Japanese) filters out those who have only a casual interest in the VN. So the pre-translation score is dominated by hard-core fans who are more likely to rate it higher. The experience of reading a translation can be inferior to reading prose in its original language, so VNDB users rating a VN based on that translation might assign lower scores than those reading the original text. The larger drop in score for lower-rated VNs might be because they don’t attract the same care and attention by their translators, with any official localisation likely done on a lower-budget. VN popularity It isn’t just through scores that we can measure a communities’ tastes, we can also estimate a VN’s popularity through the number of votes it gets. In comparing the number of votes the same VN gets on EGS and VNDB, we can see whether the same VNs are popular in both Japan and the West. Note that this chart is using a log scale. The most obvious trend is the clear split between translated and untranslated VNs. Unsurprisingly, translated VNs and EVNs do significantly better on VNDB than untranslated VNs. But we Western fans aren’t especially choosey, even fairly unpopular VNs on EGS can attract large fanbases on VNDB if they’re translated. Given that translations aren’t random, they require either dedicated fan-translators or a localiser willing to invest in them, it’s surprising that the translated VNs span the entire width of popularity on EGS. So we might have expected it to skew more to the right, with unpopular EGS VNs being much less likely to get a translation. While the ratio of translated-untranslated VNs is higher for more popular EGS VNs, no VN seems to be beyond the prospect of being translated, no matter how unpopular it is. Overall, while there remains a correlation in popularity between EGS and VNDB, it’s far weaker than the score correlation. This mismatch might partially be down to the age of the communities. VNs have been a popular niche of the Japanese market for decades, but were virtually unknown in the West before the 2010s. So there’s quite a number of 80s-00s era JVNs that have hundreds of votes on EGS, but are practically unheard of on VNDB. Differences in taste So far we’ve been looking at each VN as a whole, but can we delve deeper? A VN can be seen as a package of tropes: childhood-friend heroine, tsundere heroine, dumb male protagonist that’s inexplicably beloved by all (these 3 criteria should narrow us down to approximately 90% of all VNs ever made /s). Through comparing the scores of VNs that have a trope against those who don’t, we can get an impression of how popular that trope is. Fortunately we don’t have to determine these tropes ourselves, both EGS and VNDB allow users to apply tags to a VN which denote the type of content it has. So let’s start simple and see which tags are correlated with a higher average score on EGS. This world cloud ranks the EGS tags by the average score of the VNs they appear in, with higher scores being placed higher on the chart, so we can see what type of content is most lauded on EGS. The text size is proportional to the number of VNs that tag appears in, so we can see what’s a common trope and what’s rare. A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here. Note that this is mostly using google translate for the EGS tags, so the labels are… imaginative. Generally, it seems like complex VNs (with tags such as “intelligent,” “to solve a mystery” and “difficult to get”) are the most highly rated, while more sexual oriented tags seem to be linked with lower average scores (which is probably due to nukige/porn VNs). It also seems Japanese fans value the *novel* over the *visual* element in their VNs, with “CG is beautiful” being rated quite poorly. Towards the bottom are tags mostly related to being old or low-budget (with tags such as “Low price” and “XP supported”). This has only shown us what Japanese fans like, but we’re more focused on how Japanese and Western fans compare. So instead, let’s try comparing which VNDB tags are correlated with a VN scoring higher on VNDB or EGS. A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here. It seems like Western fans value romance and slice of life type stories more than Japanese fans do, whereas Japanese fans are more generous with their nukige/porn ratings. Perhaps we’re more judgemental in our view of sexual content here in the West? Japanese settings also seem to be more favoured among the Western fandom than the Japanese, the weeabooism is real /s. Slightly disappointing is how poorly female protagonists do in the Western fandom. While otomes are widespread in the EVN market, they remain a relatively unpopular niche on VNDB. Differences in the marketplace We’ve compared the taste between the Japanese and Western fandoms, but we haven’t looked at the differing availability of VNs in the markets. Are certain types of content more likely to be translated than others? How does the the home-grown Western VN industry differ from the Japanese one? A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here. It seems that action/violent type content -whether in the form of police investigations or wars- are especially popular subjects for translated VNs. Female protagonists are also surprisingly high, especially since otomes don’t seem to be translated that often, but that might be because an even smaller proportion of nukige/porn type VNs are translated, and they overwhelmingly have male protagonists. Lastly, let’s look at the EVNs. With a negligible presence in Japan (there were only 4 EVNs on EGS with at least 4 votes), we can’t really compare what the fans prefer, but we can see how the markets differ in the kind of content they produce. This next chart tracks which VNDB tags are more common in EVNs vs JVNs. A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version that includes more tags is available here. The sexual content tags were removed because there’s so little sexual content in EVNs that it seemed a waste of space, and it gave room to include rarer content type tags. The clearest difference between the markets is in the amount of porn, there’s exceedingly little in EVNs. This is likely due to the smaller budget for EVNs which would preclude h-scene artwork, and restrictions on adult content on Steam discouraging such content. EVNs encompass a broader range of protagonists than JVNs with LGBTQ+ related content being much more common, and female protagonists being as common as males (unlike JVNs where female protagonists make up only a small proportion of VNs). But JVNs can be inclusive in other ways, like being the sole representation of protagonists who can turn into panties. Stories relating to personal difficulties, especially regarding depression, seem much more common in EVNs too. They also seem more willing to break from the usual high-school settings of JVNs, having more university aged and above characters. Criticisms Before we get carried away with forming any stereotypes of Japanese and Western fanbases from this data, let’s consider a few issues with the data. The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. It’s easy to mix up cause and effect. Are sci-fi stories better than other stories and that’s why they’re associated with higher scores? Or is it that VNs that care about their story are just more likely to have a sci-fi setting? Some trends, like what type of content is more likely to be translated, might just be tracking the changing tastes of the era. With older VNs being less likely to be translated than newer VNs, the charts might just be picking up on what kind of content has become more popular in recent years. The dataset has some errors. EGS and VNDB catalogue VNs differently and that can cause some mismatches in the data. We’ve done our best to account for that, but with the dataset being so large, some mistakes will have slipped through. Acknowledgements A big thank you to /u/8cccc9, Part-Time Storier, and Cibelle for helping with this analysis. I hope you enjoyed reading through this, and if so, you should check out my tumblr and twitter for more VN analysis posts. If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions for further analyses then you can reply here, on twitter, or DM me on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616). Our next analysis post is likely to be on h-scenes. What type of content is most highly regarded by the fandom? How has the popularity in the fandom of certain sexual acts risen erect and fallen limp over time? How is the EVN market handling sexual content in contrast to Japan? Hopefully we’ll have lots of answers (and some painful puns) next time~

Well, as of thirty-nine minutes ago, it is officially my birthday (as of the time I checked at the beginning of making this post). I have a lot of things to reflect on this year. I am now thirty-six, settling into the beginnings of middle-age, knowing my lifestyle will probably kill me before I hit fifty. I'm a sugar addict, I love fatty foods, I make my own alcoholic drinks (this year, a mixed fruit wine that actually turned out well and was much easier than the rum and hard root beer I did last year). I sit on my ass eighty percent of the time, I am hugely fat... ... and I'm surprisingly happy. I won't say I don't have my down moments. Looking back, I regret not going for more athletic pursuits while my knees and back could still stand them. I regret not trying for a more regular and less... frustrating line of work. However, I can honestly say that, for all its frustrations, I actually seem to like being a fat, balding otaku who has pretensions at being some kind of VN guru (lol). I do wish that I could fit into a plane seat, lol. If I ever go to Japan, it is going to have to be a sea trip, since buying two plane tickets for one person is both embarrassing and more than a little expensive. I hate my work, but I'm good at it and, in good times, it pays well, so I keep doing it. So what would I change? Honestly, it is hard to say. I won't pretend I'm all love and joy when it comes to life. I have too much toxic waste going through my brain for that (I just happened to have gained just enough maturity not to feed the trolls constantly *smiles dryly*). I'm fundamentally a passive person once I set foot outside my hobbies, preferring not to do anything I don't absolutely have to do. I'm also negative and misanthropic... but is that stuff I actually want to change? *shrugs* I've never been any other way, so it is impossible to say. However, every year I hit this day and wonder what could have been, which probably says everything that needs to be said about my experiences with life, for all my proclamations of relative happiness.

Original Fakku forum release: Thanks to the help from a kind benefactor, I acquired the Steam release. Steam users can now y o r o k o b e. Figuring out how the Steam release worked was such a damn pain. Not much was updated, apart from a few thousand scene seek thumbnails. Mainly giving Steam users some love. MAITETSU 18+ RESTORATION PATCH v1.3 7-10-2018 MAITETSU 18+ STEAM RESTORATION PATCH v1.3 7-10-2018 Maitetsu WIP Decensor patch thread The main issues I was dealing with while making that patch that most certainly limited how much I can do are: 1. KrkrExtract just doesn't want to cooperate majority of the time when extracting XP3's. 2. When it does, it doesn't even extract the stuff I needed. 3. Repairing the sprites requires my being able to repack EMote .pbs files with edited .bmp images. Not hard at all to do, just repacking is the issue AFAIK 4. The data.xp3 is encrypted. About half of it KrkrExtract can get done, but the half that i'd need to fully repair the "filesystem" I guess you can say into something usable is. 5. God help me TJS2 bytecode is one of the most disgusting atrocities I have seen. Bless based nihongo tools If there is anyone out there who knows the KiriKiriZ engine or EMote engine, your input is always welcome. Suzu ga besto desu

I've been analysing the sexual content of VNs, what's become more common, what gets the best ratings, and what content tends to come together; and thought I'd present some of my results in a slightly different way: in a quiz! Using the extensive character database on vndb, I tracked which appearance and personality traits were more or less likely to engage in types of sexual activity, and put the results in a quiz format so you can enter the tropes and it'll tell you how the percentages diverge from the average. This is a slightly silly way to present the results, but I thought you guys might enjoy it. You can try the quiz here.

I’ve recently read a few thoughtful discussion threads on the state of the VN market here in the West. Some taking a negative stance, some with a more positive outlook. I thought I’d try to put some numbers on these statements and look at VN ownership on Steam, still the predominant market for PC games, and use that to analyse whether VNs are on their true route or have stumbled into a bad end. Data collection I checked just over a million steam profiles to try and get a random sample of gamers. With Steam’s new private-by-default profile settings, only 8% of those users had public game lists, but that still gave us 80k user profiles to work with. I could then compare my sample with the “leaked” owner data and scale up my numbers accordingly to represent Steam as a whole. Steam is rather haphazard with what gets tagged as a Visual Novel (RPGMaker games like A Bird Story are tagged as VNs), so I’ll only be including games that also have a VNDB entry. Steam VN releases So let’s start simple, with a simple plot of how many VNs are being released each month. At first glance things seem rosy for VN fans, there have never been more VNs being released in the West. But let’s break down those results a bit: Note that these trends are cumulative but NOT stacked. The EVN, JVN, and other VNs trends include only non-free VNs. Here we can start to see the reason for the differing perspectives on the state of the VN market depending upon whether you read more JVNs or EVNs. While the rate of EVNs releases has steadily increased, the number of new JVNs has remained fairly static since 2016, despite Steam’s lowered release requirements. Steady release rates aren’t definitely bad news, but in general profitable industries want to expand, so the lack of expansion tells you something about the industry. But as someone with a plan-to-read list that grows longer by the day, I’m not complaining if the rate doesn’t increase. One under-reported development in the VN market is the recent rapid growth of Chinese VNs (listed as other here), who have quietly been doing well in their home markets, but are rarely translated. So while more VNs might be good for us fans, how does the market look for developers? Let’s have a look at VN sales. Note that these trends are cumulative but NOT stacked. All sales are back-dated to the release date of the VN on Steam. Free VNs count sales as the number of users who have logged some playtime in it. Unfortunately Steam’s API doesn’t list when someone bought a game, so we’ve got to group sales by the release date of the VN. That means there will be a bias towards older releases which have been out longer and so had more time to build up sales. Here we can see some justification for the doom and gloom perspectives, with more recent VN releases selling significantly less than older ones. With new JVNs in 2017 selling only half what they did in 2016. The EVN downward trend is especially stark given that the number of new releases has been increasing, so that’s less revenue split among even more VNs. Not all VNs are equal, some are priced higher, so let’s look at total revenue rather than total sales. Note that this assumes every user pays full price, so this is more the maximum possible revenue than actual revenue. Here we can see the difference between EVN and JVN markets. While JVNs sell only half as many as EVNs, they earn almost as much revenue due to their higher price. We again see the same dip in more recent revenue though, 2017 was only 46% of 2016′s revenue, and 2018 looks even worse so far. Remember, this fall in revenue coincidences with an increase in the total number of releases, so to fully comprehend the drop on revenue, let’s look at the average sales per VN. First, we should note that this massively overestimates the average revenue generated as it assumes every user pays full price. I know devs who would sell their soul for 282k per VN. Oh wait, they already did when they signed up for Steam... (just kidding, I do like Steam, but it has issues). The important aspect here isn’t the y-axis total which is unreliable, but the consistent downwards trend. But it might not be as bleak as it seems, older VNs are more likely to have been in bundles and in Steam sales, so their revenue is likely overestimated compared with more recent releases. So I’d be hesitant to claim that revenue is necessarily dropping, but I think we can confidently claim that revenue isn’t increasing. VN Reviews Nostalgia for a past golden age is common everywhere, not least among VN fans. It’s not uncommon to hear that newly released VNs aren’t as good as older ones, but can we get any empirical data on this point? We can get close by looking at the Steam reviews of VNs over time. Each dot represents the average thumbs up/down ratio for any VNs released that month. Within the JVN market, we can see some truth to the nostalgia viewpoint. Older releases were more consistently rated higher. But that isn’t to say there aren’t new highly rated JVNs. They still maintain enviously high scores overall. As for EVNs, while they had consistently scored lower than JVNs, they’re catching up and are now pretty comparable in review ratings of JVNs. Just for fun, let’s see how the total review count compares between VNs. The two free-VN spikes are for Emily is Away and DDLC. As I’m sure anyone familiar with the VN community can tell you, JVN fans are vocal, and it shows in the total reviews VNs get. Despite there being only half as many JVNs as EVNs, they still attract more reviews than EVNs do. This is perhaps because JVNs are typically far longer than EVNs, so might be worth the time of writing a review. What free-VN fans lack in the wallet, they make up for in their word-count. Although this is massively skewed by two free VNs which compromise 70% of all free-VN reviews: Emily is Away and DDLC. They seem anomalies rather than trends. As shown by the graph when we exclude those two: *Excluding Emily is Away and DDLC. Despite the drop in position, free-VNs still out-perform what we’d expect given their lower count of total owners, but that may be because EVN and JVN totals include users who own the VN but have never read it. Whereas the free-VN total only includes those who have logged playtime in that VN, so there’s a larger pool of possible reviewers. Potential Issues There are a few sources of uncertainty in the dataset. The selection of users who have set their profiles to public might not be representative of the wider Steam userbase. It probably undercounts more casual fans who are less likely to configure their Steam profile. We also don’t know when someone purchased a VN, so it’s possible VN sales are increasing, but a lot of that money is going to older releases, especially if they’re in bundles and Steam sales. In inclusion of VNs in game bundles may be distorting the image of the VN fandom, as it’ll include those who have little interest in the medium and only own a VN by happenstance. We should also remember that “Steam” is not synonymous with the VN market. There are plenty of competitors in the VN scene, namely Mangagamer and itch.io, who tend to cater to different tastes than Steam does. So we’re only getting a partial picture of the Western VN scene. Conclusion There’s data here to support both the optimistic and pessimistic commentary. On the positive side, there have never been more VNs being released as there are now. EVNs are improving with higher average ratings and a few have reached mainstream attention. On the pessimistic side, it seems like there are ever more VNs competing for a fanbase that isn’t significantly growing. While I’d be wary of claiming profits are falling, it seems highly likely they aren’t increasing, and a stagnant market is not a healthy one. Personally, I think the future is bright. While VNs might not be destined to become blockbuster successes, there is enough of sustainable fanbase to support lots of indie developers, who are the most prone to innovate and write interesting new stories. As a VN fan, I’m excited to see what comes next~ --- I hope you found the article interesting. I had wanted to include a section analysing the Steam users, how many VNs do JVN fans purchase compared to EVN fans etc. But I want to spend a little longer going into more depth on it, so I’ll have a post up next week on that. If you’re interested in more until then, check out my other tumblr analysis posts, look out for updates on my twitter, or give me a yell on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616). Special thanks to /u/8cccc9 for collaborating on the analysis, and Part-time Storier for proof-reading. I just do these analyses for fun, but if you want to support my work with a tip, I accept small donations at ko-fi.

As communities age, a mythology tends to build up around their origins, with past eras vaguely alluded to as “golden ages.” I’ve seen this happen with reddit’s /r/visualnovels, a place I moderated during its most transformative stage, so I thought I’d offer my insider’s take on its history: what we’d hoped to achieve as moderators, the unintended side-effects of our policies, and why I think /r/visualnovels is stagnating these days. Fuwanovel isn't /r/visualnovels, but there's a lot of overlap in the fandom and I thought that given Ange's recent "state of the fandom" post, you guys might find it interesting. Given my acrimonious departure from the subreddit, you should take this with a grain of salt, but hopefully you'll get something from it~ The Birth of /r/visualnovels The very first posts on /r/visualnovels. /r/visualnovels was founded in late 2009 by /u/Hpdarkman525 (the former account of /u/gambs), who made one post about the upcoming Umineko ep5 fan translation and then promptly forgot about the sub. At this time, the VN fandom consisted primarily of those who had learned Japanese to read VNs, and those who wished they had. Official localisations were almost non-existent, and the fandom hung off the words of the few fan translators. Knowing about VNs felt like knowing a secret, like a secret handshake to be acknowledged as a fellow western otaku. This didn’t really change until early 2012 with the release of Katawa Shoujo. We now had a Western VN that was free, easy to install (no fiddling with system locale), pretty well written (no cliche cries of “baka” or “onii-chan”), and handled a delicate subject (disability and self-identity) with a sensitivity that really spoke to a lot of gamers. The optional nature of the adult content helped attract horny teenagers while still retaining an air of respectability. KS managed something no other VN had: attention from the mainstream gaming crowd. It drew a huge wave of new fans to the medium, among which were /u/coldacid and /u/Kuiper who became mods on /r/visualnovels and began to promote it. While the influx of new members gave birth to the community, with newbies becoming veterans, the continued dominance of KS in the VN scene began to wear thin (it wasn’t until 2016 that the number of /r/visualnovels subscribers outnumbered /r/katawashoujo). Especially grating for veterans was the cry of KS as “the best VN ever written” from those who had only ever read that one VN. The constant stream of “what do I read after KS” and rudimentary technical questions on getting Japanese VNs working drowned out the rare news posts or broader discussion threads. The mod team had a hands-off attitude to it, they’d only remove spam or blatant trolling. This only changed in early 2014 when a relatively unknown user, /u/insanityissexy, requested a mod position... The Rise of Insanity Insanityy was a member of the old-guard, being drawn to the medium for Japanese VNs and caring little for what she saw as a pale-imitation in Western VNs. With no regard for the old mods, she singlehandedly brought order to a community that had been lawless. She began with a ban on posts for technical support questions and VN recommendation requests. Instead, they should be asked in the new weekly questions thread so as to clear up the front page for news posts and more substantial discussion threads. While this move was broadly welcomed by most of the subreddit regulars, it caused some disruption as activity on the sub plummeted. With the western VN scene so small, news was rare and the number of daily posts dropped from 2-4 to just 1. While some grumbled, others were enthused in having an active moderator who cared about the sub. /u/kowzz started a discussion thread on what we could do to improve activity on the sub, and from that discussion he started the weekly Sunday discussion posts and I started the weekly “what are you reading” posts. Unlike the questions sticky, the intention wasn’t to curtail activity outside of these weekly posts, but to provide a supplement to the usual discussions and encourage users to comment more. With such regular discussion posts, users started to bump into each other more often and a sense of community began to build. On a personal level, I also grew to know insanityy better as we exchanged dozens of increasingly lengthy PMs (so much so that each reply wouldn’t fit within the 10k character limit, we had to send our replies in 3 parts), with us quickly becoming close friends. Later that year, I proposed an overhaul of the user flairs. The subreddit only offered a basic vndb icon. I wanted to expand that to hundreds of options with a larger profile picture offset to the side of a user’s post as a way to personalise each user. With enough options, I hoped it’d be easier to identify users at a glance and it’d add some character to the subreddit. I was admitted to the mod team to oversee the flair changes, but was soon upgraded to full mod status after a few months on insanityy’s urging. The two of us fed off each other’s passion as we sought to build a more active, mature, and compassionate community. We never paid any heed to the old mods, mod policy was discussed between us on google hangouts and implemented immediately. To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs. To foster a sense of community, we aimed to have a community event once a month: best X contests, census surveys, recommendation charts, fanart contests, halloween/april fool themes being among just some of the activities we organised. We even got Mangagamer to sponsor some contests with free VNs. We downplayed the seedier parts of the medium, nukige news was banned and discussions on “fapping” were frowned upon. Neither of us were against porn, we’re both fans, but we feared it’d attract a more neckbeard-type audience. We aggressively went after trolls, but not by banning them. We had automod automatically remove comments from users prone to cause drama, then we’d manually approve non-trollish comments. That way everyone was able to participate in our community, but bad behaviour wasn’t rewarded with lots of attention. In the following year, insanityy asked the inactive older mods to resign. Kuiper recognised that he was no longer needed and respectfully stepped down. Coldacid said his inactivity was only temporary and he’d be back, but later left reddit for voat as part of an anti-censorship protest. Gambs asked us to drop the subject as he didn’t want to step down, so we carried on ignoring him. We also added new members to the mod team: /u/FunwithGravity for his knowledge of Japanese, /u/Cornetto_Man because he got along with everyone, and /u/Avebone because he was active at times when the rest of us were asleep. They were added primarily to approve posts mistakenly removed by automod when me and insanityy were afk and had little input on mod policy. Everything seemed to be going great, we had a growing community that we got along with, trolls were few and far between, and our moderation seemed popular. Then we got a modmail suggesting we try out a new chat program called Discord... Discord on Discord When /u/Kowzz and /u/Arcanus44 suggested creating a Discord server, we were initially skeptical. It sounded just like irc, and the /r/visualnovels irc channel had been comatose for years. However Kowz and Arc promised to take care of it for us, Kowz would create the server and Arc would drum up interest. So in Sept 2015, Arc hosted a “meet n’ greet” in voice chat on Discord. While it was by most accounts a success and quite popular, we got some complaints about inappropriate conduct by a couple of users and decided that if this Discord server was going to be linked with /r/visualnovels, we’d need to take an active hand in making sure it maintained our standards. Kowz was happy to have us onboard, making us admins on Discord. It all seemed smooth, but underneath the surface, the seed of turmoil had been planted in our differing beliefs on who owned the server. Kowz and Arc considered themselves the owners and we were partners, while we considered them to have created the server on our behalf and that it’d run on our principles. Up until then, we’d not had any disagreements on mod policy. Me and insanityy would talk an issue out, if we agreed, we’d propose it to the rest of the mod team and vote on it. We’d picked mods who generally thought the same as us, so votes were normally unanimous. That wasn’t the case with Discord. Kowz and Arc had different ideals on how to run a community, and our usual resolution process of voting felt unfair to them as we outnumbered them 5 to 2. The problem only got worse with time as insanityy hated arguments so she avoided the staff discussions on Discord and popped in only to vote. Arc and Kowz felt increasingly marginalised by this and that their opinion wasn’t being heard. This led to a standoff where Kowz and Arc demanded their 2 votes should count for as much as the rest of us combined, while we /r/visualnovels mods threatened to create a new server unless we kept one vote each. Discussions got heated until Kowz and Arc eventually backed down. In protest, they chose to stop participating as mods. While Discord helped bring friends together, it also brought those that disliked each other together. It’s easy to ignore someone on reddit as its tree structure allows for parallel conversations, but the format of Discord makes that harder. This started to become a problem on the server, especially as Discord attracted a different type of user to the subreddit, those who had little patience for the more verbose and patient discussions of the subreddit. We got complaints from the subreddit veterans about some of the newbies but we weren’t sure what to do. Being disliked isn’t a bannable offense, but it was driving away some valued community members. We didn’t want to create a separate server that split the community, so our misguided solution was the creation of a hidden channel: #sub_regs (a.k.a. the fanclub) that was invite only and accessed via the tableflipper role. The hope was that it’d serve as a backup channel for when #general was annoying and that it’d keep the community veterans on the server. However it ended up encouraging an elitist attitude that divided the community further. The Fall of /r/visualnovels With many of the friendly conversations and community atmosphere moving to Discord, the subreddit began to suffer. Inside jokes that were incomprehensible to those not on Discord were frequent, and the community split between those using Discord and those not. There was also a degree of burnout among the mods. It’s inevitable for all mods, you spend long enough dealing with the worst of the community, the trolls and the spammers, and you begin to develop an us-vs-them mentality. You retreat from the community and draw closer to your fellow mods, looking down upon the normal users. We mods gradually stopped being members of the community and instead became overseers. Then there was my messy departure from the sub in April 2016. Due to a range of factors: financial difficulties, gender dysphoria, and some toxic “friends,” I became deeply depressed and tried to commit suicide. My fellow subreddit mods (and best friend insanityy) decided the best response was to out me as transgender, block me on social media, and ban me from the subreddit I’d loved so deeply. Insanityy never spoke to me again. The rest of this is speculation, I was no longer an insider, but from my perspective it looked like this event accelerated the emotional distance insanityy felt from the subreddit as she stopped caring about the community. She tried to carry on as normal at first, running a few contests, maintaining the animated banners I’d once made, but her heart wasn’t in it. She resigned later that year. With her went the desire to innovate, to improve the community. The remaining mods were followers, not leaders. They could maintain some cosmetic updates and copy the old contests, but they were unable to do anything new. They enlarged the mod team with an additional four members, but it only increased the sense of inertia and made it even harder to get anything done. The subreddit began to feel stale. The mod team had also become unbalanced, where once me and insanityy spoke up for minority tastes in EVNs and otomes, now the mod team was dominated by Japanese VN fans just as the VN scene was increasingly embracing EVNs. The subreddit felt more elitist than ever just as the medium had never been more diverse. Unintended Side Effects While our policies may have made sense at the time, some of the decisions me and insanityy had made began to have a detrimental impact on the subreddit: We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub. We’d brought on Automod to help remove posts when only me and insanityy had to manage everything. We found having a bot leave the removal comment sparked fewer arguments with OP than if one of us did it, and it was more effective at catching spam. But while we strived to reapprove mistakenly removed posts promptly, sometimes OP deleted their post before we could. Psychologically, it also made it dangerously easy to leave some content removed. As we mods burnt out over the years, our standards for what counted as a worthy post kept getting higher with fewer and fewer posts being approved. The end result has been a severe drop in discussion posts on the sub. When recruiting new moderators, we sought people who thought as we did so mod decisions would be consistent and there wouldn’t be arguments in the mod chat. Modding is stressful enough without the stress coming from within the mod team. However, as you add more mods who agree with you, you can start to have an inflated view of how widespread your opinion is. A circlejerk mentality builds and outside opinion is increasingly easy to dismiss. This can leave users feeling like their opinions don’t matter to the mods and builds resentment. Insanityy was a kind soul and hated conflict, she avoided disagreements as much as possible. As a friend, this was fine, but as a mod it meant she avoided openly discussing mod policy on the subreddit as inevitably there would be some disagreement. This lack of discussion with the sub made it hard for users to object to the direction the sub took, allowing the mod team to grow out of touch with what the userbase wants. Hopes for the Future While I may have been quite critical of the current state of the subreddit, I think the community is a good one and there’s hope for improvement. A smaller, more motivated mod team would help, as well as scaling back some of the restrictions like the question and image-post ban. Let activity on the subreddit explode. Should low-quality content grow to become a problem, perhaps /r/visualnovels should split just as /r/gaming and /r/games have, or perhaps a split between Japanese and English VNs would help? Not every idea will work out, but what’s important is to be trying new ideas and be responsive to change rather than clinging to an outdated format. As I said at the start, please remember this isn’t an impartial view on the history of the sub and that this isn’t meant to downplay the hard work of the current mod team. Modding is exhausting, it’s a constant burden with little praise. Even if I consider them poor mods, it doesn’t make them bad people. I know she won’t ever read this, nor will she care what I think, but I still believe insanityy was an inspirational mod and a wonderful friend. It’s incredibly hard to go it alone like she did when she first took over /r/visualnovels. She stood up for what she thought /r/visualnovels could be and put in so much effort, every day, rain or shine, she never shirked from her responsibilities. I miss her every day. If anyone wants to know more or say hi, you can contact me here on Fuwanovel, tumblr,, twitter, or Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616)

It's that time of the year again. Time to reflect on everything you made of good and bad in the year. But who cares about getting chained down by your past forever huh? So let's skip that part and look forward to the future! To what we can (and can't do) to make Fuwanovel great... again? Did we ever were great? Debatable. So anyways, let's all collect suggestions of changes we want to see here in the coming year. If you're feeling a bit uninspired, I suggest to vote for one of the wonderful suggestions I make below. Because I thought long and hard (aka 3 minutes, rough estimation) in the well being of our beloved dysfunctional community. Create a pinned "Translation Salt" thread under Visual Novel Talk, because lately every single release gets this; Rename Walkthrough section to "SeniorBlitz's Secret Dungeon"; Rename Translation Projects to "Fan Translations Burial Ground" because lately they're mostly dropped anyway; Create a board "Introduce Yourself and Never Speak Again" under Introduce Yourself because yep; Rename Community Coordination and Feedback to "Tay and Co. Burial Ground" (I'm sorry Tay, we love you); Create a pinned "Looking for Hentai Animation or Visual Novel (Powered by Monta93TM)" thread under Anime/Manga Recommendation; Rename Leaderboard to...... anything tbh no one will notice kek kthxbye

Perhaps the most universal complaint of those who read Japanese VNs, regardless of their tastes, is the bland, non-people, average protagonists that make up better than 90% of all VN protagonists. This trend began with the first moege, as a technique to allow people to self-insert more easily, but the tradition has worked against VNs more than it has worked for them, with protagonists with unique quirks turning out to be almost as important to a VN's lasting popularity as heroine quality. Unfortunately for those new to VNs, it is impossible to tell at a glance whether a protagonist will be interesting or not based on the cover, since most protagonists don't have a tachie, voice-acting, or a character description on the official site, lol. So, as a service to my fellow Fuwans, I decided to go ahead and make this list. The greater majority of these games will be untranslated, but I will go ahead and list ones that are translated that I know of. Feel free to help me add to the list, though this one is for Japanese-origin games, not EVNs. The baseline for these protagonists will be that they are either unique, unusual, or capable (intelligent, talented, and/or skilled at something and have something approaching a personality) without deliberate nerfing of their qualities to make heroines stand out more. Harem protagonists who are merely kind to everyone will not count for the purpose of this list, and characters whose personality/capabilities/talents/skills get toned down in the heroine routes will also not qualify. Translated Tokyo Babel Ayakashibito Hello, Lady (soon) Hapymaher Noble Works (yes, he does make the baseline) Dracu-riot (assuming the official release comes out) Nanairo Reincarnation (soon) Tsukihime FSN Comyu (yes, I include this... because even if you hate Akihito's man-whore qualities, he is definitely not a cardboard cut-out character) Rance games (I hate the Rance games, personally, but you can't say he isn't unique) Majikoi Tsujidou-san no Jun'ai Road (Dai only seems sheeple on the surface... he has enough depth as a character to qualify) Eien no Aselia (while his personality is standard for a jrpg protagonist, it has enough twists and unique qualities to make the list) Seinarukana (similar to above) Fata Morgana no Yakata (I wavered because of the way the game is structured, but I chose to list it anyway) Grisaia series Kikokugai Demonbane 11eyes Rewrite (I hate this protagonist, but he stands out, even if he is a dumbass) Animamundi Baldr SkyDive (whenever it comes out) ChuSinGura (I honestly wavered on this one, both because the protagonist is a moron and because I don't consider this to have been truly translated) Cross Channel Daiteikoku Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai Dies Irae I/O Yumina Kyonyuu Fantasy (yes, I'm serious even as I'm laughing) Planetarian Rose Guns Days Sekien no Inganock Gakthun Sharin no Kuni Shikkoku no Sharnoth Shin Koihime Musou (apparently tl is at 100%, so I'm including it) Sorcery Jokers (Senri!!!) Tears to Tiara Tokeijikake no Leyline series Venus Blood Frontier (whenever it comes out) Wanko to Kurasou Eden* Untranslated Akeiro Kaikitan Ikusa Megami series Soukoku no Arterial Fuukan no Grasesta Madou Koukaku Silverio series Tiny Dungeon series Zero Infinity Electro-Arms Soranica Ele Kikan Bakumatsu Ibun Last Cavalier Komorebi no Nostalgica Devils Devel Concept Karenai Sekai to Owaru Hana Evolimit Bullet Butlers Tokyo Necro Soukou Akki Muramasa Ou no Mimi ni wa Todokanai Shugo no Tate series Amatsutsumi Floral Flowlove Aoi Tori Mirai Nostalgia Bradyon Veda Draculius Gensou no Avatar Abyss Homicide Club Hyper→Highspeed→Genius Inochi no Spare Hatsuru Koto Naki Mirai Kitto, Sumiwataru Asairo yori mo Konata yori Kanata Made Kanojo wa Tenshi de Imouto de Jingai Makyou "Hello, World" Natsu no Owari no Nirvana Otome ga Tsumugu Koi no Canvas Rui wa Tomo o Yobu Ryuukishi Bloody Saga Vermilion Bind of Blood Satsukoi Sinclient Tenshi no Hane o Fumanaide Suisei Ginka Yurikago yori Tenshi Made Izuna Zanshinken Tasogare no Sinsemilla Valkyrie Runabout Sekai o Sukuu dake no Kantan na Oshigoto Haru to Yuki Semiramis no Tenbin Tsukiakari Lunch Tsuisou no Augment Kamikaze Explorer Prism Recollection Houkago no Futekikakusha Izayoi no Fortuna Natsuzora no Perseus Minamijuujisei Renka Ojou-sama no Hanbun wa Ren'ai de Dekiteimasu Yami to Hikari no Sanctuary Sakura no Mori Dreamers AstralAir no Shiroki Towa Irotoridori no Sekai Senren Banka Reminiscence Akagoei series Soshite Hatsukoi ga Imouto ni Naru Harumade Kururu Haruru Minamo ni Kin'iro Loveriche Love Rec. Natsuiro Recipe Shuumatsu Shoujo Gensou Alicematic Sakura Nikagetsu Iroha ~Aki no Yuuhi ni Kagefumi o~ Campus's Uso series World Election (seriously push this one for fantasy charage lovers) Curio Dealer Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai Lamunation Sora no Tsukurikata Hikoukigumo no Mukougawa Sakura, Sakimashita Amairo Islenauts Blade x Bullet Gouen no Soleil Dekinai Watashi ga, Kurikaesu Doushite, Sonna ni Kurokami ga Suki na no?! (more charage with some plot) Boku ga Tenshi ni Natta Wake Butterfly Seeker Fake Azure Arcology Re:Birth Colony Gekkou no Carnevale Hatsuyuki Sakura Gurenka Hikari no Umi no Apeiria (this guy's personality is so out there you wouldn't even be able to tell if anything effected him, lol) Hotel. (this is also a joke from me that I can share only with those few who have read it, lol) Kamigakari Cross Heart Kimi to Boku to no Kishi no Hibi Witch's Garden Kono Sekai no Mukou de Kouyoku no Soleil Lovesick Puppies (more food for charagamers) Toppara Zashiki Warashi no Hanashi Naka no Hito Nado Inai Natsuiro no Nostalgia Ojou-sama wa Gokigen Naname Onigokko Otomimi Infinity Para-Sol Prima Stella Paradise Lost Kajiri Kamui Kagura Sanzen Sekai Yuugi (only Otomege I know of that fulfills the prime condition) Primal x Hearts Tayutama (original only) Shinigami no Testament Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro Stellula Eques Codex Tasogare no Himekishi (seriously, the protagonist is subject to some interesting stuff, like akuochi and/or corruption of characters) Toki o Tsumugu Yakusoku Unjou no Fairy Tale Yuganda Uso no Koi to Letter Yoru Meguru, Bokura no Maigo Kyoushitsu Tsuki ni Yorisou, Otome no Sahou Request includes G-Senjou no Maou Aiyoku no Eustia Watashi no Real wa Juujitsu Shisugiteiru Shirogane no Soleil Root Double Edit: A lot of these characters stand out due to personality traits or quirks, as much as anything else. The key point is that the protagonist is a 'person' instead of a cipher or catalyst. For those who wonder why I didn't include Tsuki ni Yorisou, Otome no Sahou 2, the reason is pretty simple... in every path, the protagonist's individuality vanishes and he becomes enslaved to the heroine's character needs.

08/27 - COMPLETE PATCH released! Mosaic removed from all scenes! !! COMPLETE PATCH !! Maitetsu 18+ Demosaic Patch - v0.9a.7z Installation guide: - if you have downloaded the daily patch - patch3.xp3 just manually delete it ( you don't need it anymore because its already inside the Maitetsu 18+ Demosaic Patch - v0.9a.7z ) Q: "Why V0.9a? When it's complete" A: "The v1.0 slot is reserved for the install wizard with additional content/mods/etc, and the 'a' in '(v0.9) a' stands for alpha, because the patch stills needs polishing, like redrawing the first released scenes" Want to support the project?

He will be remembered. I like to think that he himself considered that he lived a good life, as it's well known his optimism and way of thinking. It's always sad to say goodbye, but in the end we must accept that is the fate we all share. He has become now one of those undying stars that will inspire the future generations. It was his books that made me interested in physics in the first place. So thank you and good night, Mr Hawking, have a good sleep.

N A N I ? ! Translations proudly presents: Tenkiame Game Name: Tenkiame | 天気雨 | Sun Shower Developer & Publisher: GumiSoft (one of InterHeart’s subsidiaries; parent company mostly makes short nukige games) Duration: Approximately 10 hours or so; around 12k lines Genre: heartwarming romance, folklore VNDB Link Official Website Game Synopsis In the middle of summer vacation, the protagonist receives news that his grandfather had fallen ill. Taking the place of his busy parents, he travelled a bit reluctantly to his grandparents’ home. Luckily, his grandfather’s situation wasn’t serious, and he spent time with his grandmother, who he hadn’t seen in a long time. She mentioned that the greenery in the area will soon disappear as it is razed for urban development. He lamented that it was a sign of the times. As he sat on the porch, feeling the cool breeze and listening to the soothing sound of the swaying wind chimes, he thought it was a very comfortable feeling. He noticed a small girl next to him, basked in the gentle sunlight. He was captivated by her beautiful hair, ears and smile. This is the beginning of a small love story with an innocent and curious white fox and a quiet and meddlesome fox. [From Hau~ Omochikaeri!] Trailer Screenshots (Early trial version build) Staff Project Leader & technical mumbo-jumbo: @Narcosis Translator: Allmighty Bee TLC: the person in question kindly asked us to not reveal his name Editor: Zanderboi QC's: Nanon, Arcadeotic, Major Popinfresh Alpha Testers: won't mention names for now but they'll be revealed at some point Honourable mentions go to @AtomCrafty, @binaryfail and everyone else, who we forgot about. Thanks for helping us, guys. INFORMATION (25/04/2018) The common route is translated and currently undergoes editing and TLC, translation on the remaining girls' routes began as well. We plan to release the trial version first around this summer, which contains the whole common route. Full patch will follow afterwards. This is also to ensure the final translation will be released as a quality product, since we want to gather feedback after the trial release. The current estimates are rough, as we plan to deliver a polished, self-extracting patch. Either way, it shouldn't take that long, at least not as long as Biman (hopefully) We want to thank @Arcadeotic and his team. Euphemic Translations will be providing us with additional help and several QC’s that we would’ve needed sooner or later. Big thanks to everyone who is now involved with the translation alongside us. PROGRESS CHART (last update: 19/04/2018) Common route: script delivered, TL: 100%, currently in editing Shiro's route: script delivered, TL: ~5% Kon's Route: script delivered, TL: 0% General FAQ Q: Is there any way to know the progress whenever I want? A: Ask here and we'll answer with the current progress. Alternatively, we will update the progress chart from time to time. Q: What is your team's translation speed? A: Bee does 100 lines per day on average except weekends, technically you can calculate the precise amount of days it'll take to complete this translation (we are too lazy to do it ourselves, lol.) Q: When are you releasing the patch? A: The translation will be done in a year, more or less, and the patch? No idea, but definitely faster than Biman. Q: No, but seriously - when will be the patch done? A: When it's done™ Q: Why aren't you looking for help in regards to more translators? A: We are trying to avoid that, as it will impact the translation's quality for a game of such length. Q: Do you even have a team name? A: Yes, it's "N A N I ? ! Translations." Q: Do you have a website? A: Yes, it's up, but it won't be presented until the trial version is out. Q: Is there any sort of place I can reach you beyond this forum? A: Yes - we have our own Discord channel, but it's currently not available to the public. We plan to open it after the trial release, though. Q: Can you show any actual proof that you're translating the game, aka images and stuff? A: Whenever we can, for now I'll just say that it's something in progress. Q: Can I donate to you? A: Better buy the game, when the translation's out. Q: Will you release a style guide (aka whether "we're taking out honorifics or not", let's get real)? A: Yes, but once the project is nearer to completion. Recruitment Currently we are fully staffed and not in need of any additional help. If any new positions open up, we will inform about that. Anyway, that's everything. We will update this topic as often, as possible. If you have any questions, suggestions, critique or simply want to thank us, feel free to leave a reply! Thanks for reading!

The problem While spurred by recent events, this essay touches on something that seems to have been a pattern in site moderation for some time now. Let me make a claim: if a rule, especially one that is vaguely worded, is not enforced, for a decent amount of people that rule does not exist. This nonexistence integrates into the mental model of the rules that forum members construct, no matter what the formal rules may say. For members using this mental model, beginning to enforce a rule that was previously unenforced is equivalent to creating a new rule. As such, the same procedures as those used to notify forum members of new rules should be applied, possibly with some adaptation on the lines of "we will now actually enforce this rule", as the rule effectively did not previously exist. The ur-example of this is the loligeddon of yore. The takeaway from the loligeddon when it comes to this essay is this: mods repeatedly stated that no rules had actually been changed. Yet nevertheless the appearance and subsequent removal of a particularly problematic post sparked sweeping policy changes, a cleanup operation, a tl;dr post by the administrator explaining the changes, et cetera. This should make it clear that changing policy is a big deal, even if no written rules actually change. Recent policy changes, however, have been very different from what happened during the loligeddon. Frequently the only indication that effective rules have changed has been moderator action, sometimes fairly strict. In essentially all cases this action has been explained either inadequately or, most commonly, not at all. When this occurs the target(s) of moderation will likely feel that they have been unfairly, erratically targeted by a capricious, uncommunicative bully. What do you do when you get bullied? Well, you could talk to HR, but the mod that bullied you is probably in HR anyway and you might not even know who did it. Another option is to fight back. You annoy me, I pay you back in kind - and if I can get some fun at your expense, sure, why not? You're a bully, you deserve it.[1] I do not mean to suggest that we need to have a tl;dr writeup every time a rule is changed, but a simple statement of intent would be appreciated. I estimate that writing this should take no more than 20 minutes. As an example, here's a hypothetical notice regarding the changing of rules on gifs that took me ~10 minutes to write. Note that the policy mentioned here could be reversed or altered to be more specific if it turns out that it was unclear or did more harm than good, which is arguably more difficult to do if the rule has been made official.[2] In the light of this, I would like to present some recommendations. Recommendations When moderating, consider if your action is effectively creating or modifying rules Remember: in the minds of some of your users, unenforced rules may as well not exist. If you decide to moderate something that was previously typically not being moderated, this will cause confusion and consternation. As such, whenever you make a decision, ask yourself: am I changing the rules? If so, you need to consider both whether your action is actually justified, and how you are going to inform the public of your policy change. You are not a cop, you are a judge in a precedent-setting court. This is especially true due to the (understandable) current policy of supporting other mods' decisions near unconditionally. Do not make controversial decisions when following up is difficult On some occasions moderators have moderated while on vacation, using their phone, with bad connections et cetera. I strongly recommend against making anything close to a controversial decision in these conditions. You will end up both ruining your vacation and doing a bad job. Talk first, shoot later If you are performing a moderator action which reasonably should include notifying the target of the action, write up the informative PM or otherwise establish communication before enforcement. You could also consider writing up the notification of intent to change / differently enforce / clarify rules before moderating. Most of the time nobody is harmed much by leaving something up until you can handle it properly. For things that require more urgent management such as a fast-evolving derailment, consider either using a PM template for 1-2 people or making a post stating that you have removed derailing posts in the thread you moderated. Make people feel heard One key theme of this essay is the importance of communication. This extends beyond just notifying people of changes to the rules. I am under no illusions that your actions will go uncontested or that people won't meme and fling shit at you even if you try your best to communicate as advised in this essay. In part this is due to the frustration some people, and certainly I myself, consider you responsible for creating due to your actions up to this point. However, when hostility meets well-practiced civility its fires often run out of fuel. If you constructively engage with those who would oppose you, you can both soothe their frustration and create better, more precise final rules. Obviously there has to be a limit and ultimately you set the rules to follow. But explaining, refining, and justifying your position elevates it from that of a dim-witted bully with little justification for their actions to someone who has a well-grounded but different opinion of what the rules should be. The first one deserves punishment, the second, grudging respect. As a personal observation: in general, you should assume that much less of your decisions are obviously justified than you currently think. One man's common sense is another man's borderline acceptability is another man's utterly idiotic rule enforcement. Moderation is a hard job If this all seems like a lot of hard work to you, congratulations! That's what I thought too when the mod applications came along, so I didn't apply. Any moderators that cannot actually moderate disputes should either confine themselves to routine, uncontroversial moderation tasks or step down from their position. Believe me, nobody will die either way, and you'll get to spend your free time doing something that suits you better. Notes [1] I personally don't consider the mods bullies when I do this kind of thing, but I do consider them deserving of public ridicule. The intention is both to correct behaviour and to extract some entertainment out of people that deserve to be made fun of. And yeah, I have no respect for authority. None. I will judge you by your actions alone. [2] This is an assumption based on my conception of normie considerations like pride, sticking with your decision, whatever. Obviously if a rule does more harm than good it should be removed whether or not it was enforced temporarily, but it is probably easier to do so politically if it was in fact considered temporary. Look, I'm trying desperately not to kill all normies every day here. Give me a break.

After ten years playing VNs, you would think I would have completely lost faith in them by now, especially considering just how many I've played (744 not counting most of the nukige, replays and incomplete/dropped ones). Most VNs that aren't nukige are SOL-fests that exist solely to promote nostalgic fantasies about life in high school and getting into bishoujos' pants... not that that is an entirely horrible goal, but it isn't something I want to see five hundred times over. The romance is usually puerile and has no relation to reality, the characters have all their hard edges filed away by the needs of the archetype, and drama is used solely to add 'spice' (like one sprinkle of pumpkin spice, not cracked red pepper) to an otherwise endlessly sweet and bland recipe. So how is it that someone who has experienced that much essentially boring and pointless repetition of the same scenarios able to continue to enjoy VNs, even if he can't stand meaningless SOL anymore? At one time, it was a sense of duty, a belief that I was doing the community good by digging gems out of the piles of crap that are the SOL genre. I also had a sense of pride that I made an effort of objectivity that I have literally seen no one else attempt. I played games no one else bothered with because they didn't have the time or patience, and I did it because I thought someone looking at the games would want to know what they were getting into. I paid a price in a growing sense of bitterness, of boredom, and of a sense that I was forgetting the reason why I began to read fiction in the first place. I paid a price in people continually being trolls and trying to draw me into fights over my opinions on these games. I had people start reddits and send me pms being sympathetic about the very conversations they'd started (yes that happens). I also had people who respected what I was doing, and I knew there were people in the community who benefited from the fact that I was doing it. I watched VNs I had pushed get localizations and fantls (usually to my surprise), and I saw others that I had labeled as mediocre get hyped to a ridiculous degree. I tried to get other people to help with what I was doing, only to find that, without a reading speed similar to mine, it was too much of a burden on their lives and ate up the time to read the VNs they wanted to read. The bad generally outweighed the good immensely while I was doing VN of the Month, and even after, I found that the after-effects of my years of playing games I wasn't interested in personally had left me with scars I was unable to feel while my sense of duty was keeping me going. However, I can say that I still haven't given up on VNs. Why? The reason is ridiculously simple and at the same time profound (at least to me). I love the medium. For someone who likes an experience that combines the reading, visual input, and music without the need for a lot of input from the one experiencing it, VNs provide a unique storytelling experience. Books are great for the imagination and can send our souls exploring across landscapes that exist only in our own minds, but VNs provide a more filled-out framework for those who don't necessarily have the imagination to fill in all the gaps on their own, without rotting the imagination to the degree manga and anime do. I've been able to get people who had trouble reading books into VNs, then led them straight back to books and opened the world of imagination to them. I've seen people who had begun to feel the otaku community offered nothing more to them come alive again after playing a chuunige or a charage. I've picked up a random moe-looking VN and found a deep and compelling story that remains within me dozens of times. In the end, it is moments, experiences like that that keep me coming back, believing in the possibilities of VNs even now. It is the desire to find more such experiences that keeps me looking at new releases each month, and it is the belief that those experiences will never entirely vanish that keeps me from condemning the industry as a whole for the way it sabotages itself at times.

Mahoutsukai no Yoru / Witch on the Holy Night System Requirements: OS: Windows XP/Vista/7 CPU: Pentinum4 over 1GHz (recommended some CPU around 2.66GHz) RAM: More than 1GB HDD: 5GB Resolution: 1024×576 pixels or higher screen Optical drive: DVD-ROM drive that supports dual-layer DirectX 9.0 First, I'd like to apologize for the long wait, and your patience was rewarded, with perhaps a much steadier stream of updating from now on [hopefullly!]. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PROGRESS: Chapters 1 to 6 - translation complete Chapters 1 to 1.5 - patched and ready to go GAME INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS: Remember to change System Locale in the Region settings to Japanese. PATCH INSTALLATION: MAHOYO patch + Aolight font download FONT AOLIGHT IS REQUIRED ALONGSIDE THE PATCH (PLEASE INSTALL INTO PC BEFORE RUNNING THE GAME) Aolight is a modified version of Aozora Mincho Regular. I tweaked it so that the text could be properly displayed in the game, because the space for each letter in-game is displayed inside an invisible rectangle that cuts off the letters when they're italicized and need more spacing in their letter display. Make sure you have it selected at the game's Change Font menu. The wordwrap is tailored specifically to this font and anything else besides this will not work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In all of these fan attempts, one fan patch, and Commie's silence on their entire Mahoyo project........here's my attempt, with the objective being: to finish it! A modern-day teen witch becomes friends with an old-fashioned teen witch, and meets a boy hailing from the incredibly rural mountainside. And with that, the magic begins. ...Polishing it to a nice sheen with respects to its own gem of just your typical slice of life shoujo with a heaping whopper of magic thrown in so dazzling we have to stop and admire the assembly of a spectacular lightshow presented in visual novel format. Thanks Kirikiri! *heaves, out of breath* In all seriousness: I have always loved this linear yet beautiful visual novel, so happened to be published by the company that released Tsukihime and the more renowned Fate/stay Night. It was a surprise to see that for once, this was for all ages. Not only is it pretty in visual terms (and I mean the art has improved), but the music is just fluid and breath-taking when accompanying the story. Props to Hideki Fukasawa, it's like the VN was made for his music. Or is it the other way around?? Let it not be said that creator and co-founder of Type Moon, Kinoko Nasu, doesn't drop a few ero jokes regarding Mahoyo. Maybe at some point, I'll share his comments going through the script files, cause it can get laugh out loud funny what he inserts for every semicolon. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The only person on this ship is its captain, and the captain sure likes to do all of the ff: 1) Translation 2) Accuracy check 3) Proofread 4) Edit 5) Code Credits for presenting a workaround on the wordwrapping/page count problem and pointing out where the game titles are goes to frc_ Thanks much, man!

EDIT: Patch taken down for some important reasons. Check in later for details. Instructions: Simply insert the patch file, root.pfs.003, into your Boku to Nurse no Kenshuu Nisshi game folder (the folder with the other root.pfs files). VNDB FAQ: Staff: Merry Christmas!

Fureraba ~Friend to Lover~ Summary Springtime. The season of the cherry blossoms, and a time of new beginnings, new encounters, and new people. For Aoba Kyousuke, this new season marks the start of his second year in high school, and after taking a moment to reflect, and looking at the friends around him... All he can find is a dumbass too horny for his own good, and a weirdo who can't get over his strange fetish for lizard-humanoid creatures. Sure enough he enjoys hanging out with them, and he wouldn't ever think of giving it up, but something feels missing. A precious, valuable part of everyone's adolescence, and something he might just miss out on at this rate... What is that something? Why, love. So upon realizing this, he shouts out to the world-- "I WANT A GIRLFRIEND!" He'll need to give it his all, of course, because he knows that love does not come to those who just wait. Ending Guideline / Suggested Route Order There are four heroines. In order to get into the routes proper, you must select the heroine in the choice screen (when available) and then select to talk about topics that interest her. This walkthrough will, among other things, clarify which topics interest a heroine. By selecting the topics within the walkthrough you will always receive a decent amount of affection and you may choose any combination of topics that interests you. Walkthrough Talk topics will be in brackets [] with the relevant questions for any heroine underneath between quotes "". Sometimes these questions will lead to further questions, which will be indicated by -->. Some questions seem to provide more affection, so I'll mark those with (EXTRA). (Will be removed in the final version of the guide) Not all possible questions will be presented, but there are enough that you will be able to move to the next stage. NOTE: For some of the girls, when you have one at stage 4 and another at stage 3 a jealousy short scene will display. Hiiragi Yuzuyu Mochizuki Rina Minahara Himari ??? Bad Ends and Flags Attribution This walkthrough is based on info attained by me, playing the game. Synopsis from NekoNyanSoft's website. This Rina guide is based and tested by shadowice777, a Team Rina lover.

Find your next VN with the Fuwanovel Recommendation Site! Thanks to your contribution suggesting titles and rating their newbie friendliness, we now have a site that is able to provide recommendations for you, picking from untranslated, translated and original English language visual novels! Out of our special selection, 88 titles are untranslated from Japanese, 61 are otome games, 69 are Western visual novels, and 73 are LGBT-friendly titles. We strive to provide a good selection for everyone. If you find any problem with the quiz or the site in general, contact us. You can also keep discussing, because this can be updated and worked on in the future to better follow new trends or launches. This wouldn't be possible without: @BunnyAdvocate, who devised and coded the whole thing. Special thanks to her for this great work! @Emi, who designed the website and worked on the VN headers, making everything this pretty. @MaggieROBOT and @Zakamutt, who worked on all stages of the project, having recommended VNs and worked on the details for the site to work and provide useful information. @Plk_Lesiak, @Clephas and @Zalor, who provided insight and recommendations to make this a good list and quiz for everyone. XianXian, lunaterra and nadia nova, who helped with all the immense amount of data that we had to manage. Fuwanovel at large, for being this amazing community that suggested VNs, voted and all around made it possible to there be a site like this in the VN community. So, that's you! Additional credits on the site! People not in Fuwa also helped this come to fruition and we can't thank them enough. Click on the picture below to go to the site!

Hi everybody, It's been a while. I'll make a personal update post at some point, but for the moment I'm posting to ask our users to take the first of what may be a series of surveys we put out this Summer. This first survey is essentially an open invitation to tell me exactly what problems are bothering you about the site, anonymously. My site work this Summer will be heavily influenced by this survey, so if you care about Fuwa and want to see site improvements, please participate. Survey Link: https://goo.gl/forms/DHWvWdmusKKXZBh43 I want to thank @Emi for a recent email, @Clephas for some recent posts in the forums I've read which gave me encouragement, all our moderators, @Decay for his patience with my crazy schedule and a soft VNTS pause, and all of our users for keeping Fuwanovel alive. Much love to all of you. Tay

Goddamn. It took me over 2 and a half years to get to this mark after taking 5 months to get to 1000. Well, I guess I'll explain my story on this site again for all of those people who didn't recognize me from my early days. I arrived on this site in October of 2015 as a guy who didn't have any clue about the community in general. Over time, I posted way too much for any normal human being and that caused me to be recruited by former shitposter @Dergonu and along with the now forum-dead NTR queen @CeruleanGamer, we formed this spammer group and it's grown into a public Discord since that PM group was formed back in January of 2016. Along the way, I grew more elitist and cynical for the VN community and this was mainly triggered by Noble Works, the worst VN to ever be read by human eyes. Then I left for like 2 years from this site as it was becoming quite dead, at least to me. I came back and started posting again in January of this year and hopefully, I stick around to shitpost/give my opinions to others for a while longer. Now time to be an annoyance and mention random people I like (in a hetero way). @Dergonu - You may be a nazi mod now, but I still remember when you were a spammer just like me. Keep being shitty with your taste for me. @DarkZedge - We basically don't agree on anything besides Kara no Shoujo, but you're still a cool neko lover and you're just as cynical as me, so that's good. @Arcadeotic - The original serious poster. I still can't forgive you for ruining Gahkthun for me, but I still expect an overly semi-serious post about this. @Kawasumi - Trap lover, trap in general, and a person with good taste in VNs. @HMN - The best male alive. Glad to have you in the Anti Moege Task Force and as a fellow Kyonyuucon. @Kiriririri - The worst taste in this community. Keep that in your moemory. Just kidding, good luck on your fruitless mod quest. @AaronIsCrunchy - My favourite british metalhead, even if I have no clue what your taste in VNs is at this point. @Flutterz - The second best thing about the Fuwachat, compared to DemonSabre. @Funnerific - You may not like a lot of my favourite VNs, but we can relate in G-Senjou no Maou, so that's good enough. @Zakamutt - A fellow elitist and hater of most translations. Finish Himawari already. @greenshadow622 - You and I were allies in the headpat bans of 2017 and we will forever be bonded by that. @Nintaidou - Thank you for showing me all of those kyonyuu nukige. They were...appreciated. @madvanced - Fellow portuguese man, so that's enough to be cool with you. I have no clue about anything else though, besides that you meme. @Forgetful Frank - Here's some advice for life. Actually finish a VN before picking up 3 more. It'll help you to like certain VNs more. @Ayana - The guy with the most similar taste to mine. Shame you can't be online to talk more often, but the conversations are pretty cool. @Asonn - My favourite toddlercon and hater of most VNs. @Barry Benson - My favourite spanish bee. It's always fun shitting on TL companies and shitposting together. Also, I'm pretty sure you have 18 weeks to TL Tenkiame now. @Kaguya - My favourite mod currently. I don't agree with a lot of your philosophies, but I can at least understand them. Plus, having a conversation with you leads to...interesting things happening. @SpinningShiat - You're gay. (This is what you wanted, right?) Finally, I'll mention all the new people who I'm not entirely familiar with on this site since I left. People like @Thatcomicguy, @Zander, @Plk_Lesiak, @MaggieROBOT, @Ranzo, @Dreamysyu, and others. I'll recruit you guys into my spammer cult eventually. And that's all from me today. Just a reminder that you can ask me anything or roast me or whatever you want to do on this post. Here's to reaching 2000 posts in a reasonable amount of time.

Maybe I should have waited until it was a full year, but eh, I was bored. And I reached 400 posts, celebration song! I noticed that I'm here in this damn forum for 10 months now, not so much compared to the senpais but still some accomplishment. Hell, I never thought that I would come back here so often, must be some kind of curse. Or maybe, gasp, I actually enjoy spending time here! I could use the time to read visual novels instead, but time management was never my strongest asset. Well well, I was all nostalgic and then I remember that I never did an introduction thread. Until now. But at this point is kinda pointless, because by now, people must be aware of how I really am. Or not, I don't know, not sure if anyone stalks me. I hope not. Anyway, just for formalities, hi, name's Maggie, 24, Virgo, blood type O, Castlevania is my game, Carnival Phantasm is my anime, Pandora Hearts is my manga, steel is my body and fire is my blood. You must have already see me around either doing serious posts about girl games or shitposting in general, so if you remember me for either of those, I'm glad I did my job well and my contribuitions to this site weren't in vain. And it will be on that time that I'll be an important addition to this team. So, with nothing more to discuss, I decided to look back in what I did here in this past year, like a review of myself. So let's see... - I did a lot of VNR troubleshooting back when I joined and saw at least 67 noobs that create an account just to ask why the text didn't appear. Pick the text thread, pick the text thread yo, pick the text thread. I said that so many times, I can make a rap with it; - Why didn't I just ignore them? Because I actually found a fujoshi friend doing it, back in May I think :3 We still talk to this day, every day; - Speaking of friends, I'm glad I found some nice, adorable and slightly weird people derailing threads and shitposting here. So yeah, even shit had it's purpose; - I got myself a harem even; - I think I talk bad about Comyu some 103 times; - And talk good about Shingakkou other 134 times; - Played a lot of free BL and otomeges that I found around; - And 179 new games ended up in my backlog, rip; - Not counting non VN things, le double rip; - Made 248 edits to my posts. What even is english? - My most liked content was in the "realistic romance in VNs" thread. And I just said "No, and that's why it's good". See people, sometimes less is more! Or something... - I saw things... I wanted to unsee things... - Actually, I guess I became a bit more degenerated these last months. It's you guys fault; - I'm also way less productive now; - Joking, I love this place. (Obs: this last one may vary with my mood) Yeeeep, sounds like that was a busy year! I hope to be with you guys one more year! Or be able to free myself from this place and be productive agaaaaaaaaaaaaain! AMA, except my three sizes. And post some pretty boys while you do so, please, thank you.

Before I go visit my remaining grandparents this weekend (my grandmother on my father's side and grandfather on my mother's side are both in extremely frail condition right now, so we are taking time to show my sister's kid to them), I thought I would give my thoughts on modern VN trends. Charage aren't going anywhere Though I frequently bash the industry for over-saturating the market with moege/charage/SOL, the fact is that the demand for this type of VN is never going to go away as long as the Japanese eroge VN market exists. Why? Because it is the single easiest way to present the formation of relationships of young people into a sexual one. While the genre isn't that attractive for people in their late teens or early to mid-twenties (incidentally the reason this market is declining), the majority of any older generation is always going to prefer this. The lesser numbers of young people in Japan compared to my generation and the lower relative amounts of income are the main reasons for the current contraction of the genre. Good Writers don't go into VNs anymore This is a truth that few of the plotge addicts like me want to admit. Most of the best writers in the VN industry are getting into middle age or later now (or have already left it), and the new and upcoming writers are mostly up and coming LN writers who have a far looser grasp on how to write/narrate and (more importantly) complete a story. This doesn't mean they won't evolve their styles to match the new medium eventually, but whenever I've read a VN written by one of these newbies, the plot holes and poor handling of the endings of their games stand out painfully. Chuunige are in decline I absolutely hate to say this. However, it needs to be said. Trends in the last nine years in chuunige have tended to result in far too much side-story exploitation and sequelitis. There is also a distinct lack of innovation, and when innovation does come, it tends to come with a huge drop in quality in the final product (Sora no Baroque). Fans of the genre are getting older, and some companies (such as Light) have been putting their games in non-ero form on consoles to try to grasp the hearts of younger VN lovers (this has actually succeeded to an extent), but the fact is that it takes a much longer time for a chuunige company to make back its investment after a release. This is exacerbated by economic issues in Japan, and the fact that these companies mostly suck at advertising (like many niche genre companies, they only put it up in places where those already 'in the know' will find them). VN Trends are always years behind the rest of Otaku-dom VN communities in Japan are insular. Even moreso than they are in the US. When rom-com anime vanished for the most part at the end of the last decade, it was replaced with cheap action-fantasy (shallow, weaker stories for the most part, with more emphasis put on 'cool' elements) and moeblob. The glut of such anime is reaching its peak right now... and that influence is starting to overflow (interpreted through the lens of the hyper-conservative VN community, of course) into our side of things. That said, this is a trend that is unlikely to take hold, because it requires a modicum of writing skill that doesn't involve dialogue, and most VN writers just don't have that. Instead, VN companies that have been around for a while have been 'testing the waters' by making games that step out of their usual niches, hoping to diversify to deal with the changing trends. Light went with going down a much darker path than usual with its most recent game, and Navel actually put up a half-assed plotge last month. These, along with many other incidences in the last two years, make me wonder just what the market will look like five years from now.

I can just imagine a GOG curator reading DDLC with a checklist: Good ❌ Old ❌ Game ❌

Announcement explaining the FuwaFabulous blog here. Today I'd like to announce the 4 new people joining the FuwaRecognition team! First of all, an old beloved member. VNTS commentator, blogger and general fuwa oldtimer, @Zakamutt! As a second member, we have @Arcadeotic. Old fuwachat moderator (hey do you remember that?) and general Gahkthun lover (bleh) he's sure to give us wonderfully unique highlight options as expected of his wonderfully unique taste. Our third member is a dark horse. Converted from the evil spammer forces, the kyonyuu loving anti-moe knight, @VirginSmasher! As another new addition we have fuwa's latest and greatest artist @EastCoastDrifter. His angle, speed and style aren't something a normal car can match! Of course, last but not least is good ol' me. But you knew that already, didn't you? And together we are the Power Ran- ahem the FuwaRecognition Team, bringing you new highlights from our Fabulous Fuwa community every month! As secondary announcements, voting for the fuwa discord VN reading club has ended, and we'll be reading and discussing symphonic rain this month. We're also going to launch a JP-learning group soon, for complete newcomers and beginners. If you want to give a shot to learning japanese while real-time chatting with our fuwacommunity or just hang out and relax, now's the chance! We'll be starting this weekend! https://discord.gg/F79q4dp

So recently, I've been playing a game called Space Engine, which is a really cool universe simulator where you can explore stars, planets, galaxies and the like. I've stumbled onto a very interesting solar system, so I've decided to name all of the planets after Fuwanovel members, in honor of this great community. Important Note: The solar system only contains 25 planets, so obviously I couldn't reference all of Fuwanovel's members. I tried my best to name those after very prominent users. If you don't see a planet named after you, my deepest apologies. I could only fit so much within the technical limit. With that said, here is the Fuwanovel Solar System.

Something for today:

A warm welcome to our three new additions to the staff team. They have been very active members of our community through the years, always jumping in and helping newcomers with their questions and to find their next VNs to read, as well as already having some experience being part of the fuwa staff, in the case of the notorious knight of Varela. Glad to have you on board, @Mr Poltroon, @Clephas and @Dergonu. I'd also like to announce we have upgraded @Zenophilious to a global moderator, making it the first addition to our team since forever now. His nonstop work in moderating the forums with me these past few years have more than earned him the spot, and with this lineup, I'm sure we'll have no moderation problems for a long time to come.

Did you know Fuwanovel was once almost called Hoshinovel? No? Well, you should. Today I am here to counter the travesty that is this website that was almost named after this game having two bad reviews giving it a 1/5. Now, I haven't played this game for years, never really liked it all that much and I don't remember half the plot points or really any of the character names. I did look at a CG gallery for two minutes while cropping this avatar so that should be a pretty good reminder of the story though. Under these circumstances, you might think that writing a defense of a game would be something only a moron would do - But the loli is pretty great and I've been called much worse. Now, I don't actually remember anything about this game other than a sex scene with this one girl dressed in a maid outfit carefully licking the protagonist's ochinchin (or was that in the fandisc? Doesn't really matter), so it's pretty hard to actually write something about it. Luckily, we have Fred's review, and coupled with my memory from looking at that HCG set we can just read that and explain why he's wrong. Well, without any more chatter, let's begin. Now there's really not a lot going on with his first two paragraphs - 15 lines and he talks about who made the game, explains the premise and says the release was shit. Now, we can already see this writer's limitations at the very beginning of this review. In its first 15 lines, Hoshizora no Memoria already gave you a solid idea of something and had a girl you wanted to fuck. Probably. I dunno. Shutup it's fiction, if we do it by percentages, this is a big portion of the review, think of how much hoshimemo managed to do with that same percentage of its play time. This is pretty undeniable straightforward proof that the author of this review is a worse writer than the author of hoshizora no memoria, and so has no place to criticize his writing (since author probably just didn't get the genius behind hoshimemo.) I will note that the review's author talks about how hanging out with a loli shinigami sounds actually neat, proving his taste at least isn't complete garbage. That is, until this: Now, twintails tsundere girl is the worst girl of the story and it's pretty terrible to put her as your review's first image. She is a tsundere, and as all tsunderes are, her existence is testament that Hoshizora no Memoria is a game that truly appeals to all crowds, including, *ahem*, special people, but putting a character that's meant for the dull and braindead alike as the game's poster and first impression for normal readers is nothing but intellectual dishonesty, and I question the author's intent in doing so. Past that, he says he'll talk about why he hates the game, but only says some broad stuff about the writing being bad and "failing the bigger picture" that you can apply to almost literally anything. There are VNs where you cannot apply this phrase to, but I haven't read them, so they don't exist. He says the game has no themes other than stars, but the game's title is clearly hoshizora no memoria, which means memory of starry sky. Him needing to say that shows the review's author isn't particularly fluent in japanese and as such he can't criticize the game's original writing because he never read it. I wonder how much fuwanovel pays these people, because I could probably do much better. He criticizes the game for the use of misunderstandings as a romantic tool, but 2009 anime kimi ni todoke had a misunderstanding and it's like one of the top most popular romance otaku works of all time, so all this servers to show is that this guy doesn't know shit about romance in our medium. He talks about how there's no substance or something to grab too, but I'll get back to it after this image. This is actually a pretty cute CG but I'd like to point out he posts the obnoxious text log no one cares about in front of the loli's face, just providing us extra proof he doesn't know or get anything about the appeal of this game. Literally no one cares about what these characters are saying, it's cute, she's talking about how girls want to get close to you and how you should only enter a girl's route after you already set your mind to fuck her, all stuff that's important to hear but that we all know already. This goes back to criticizing the game "not having anything for you to grab on" and complaining about themes, it's a moege not kafka, you're just supposed to want to fuck the girls, look at her beautiful eyes and hair and black dress with the little ribbon thing having space in between her tiny shoulders as the picture reveals her skin to the moonlight. This is one of the best parts of the game where you're supposed to be at 1000% and this guy is paying attention to stuff literally no one other than reviewers cares about, and he still dedicates a whole extra paragraph to talking about this shit. If that's not missing the point, I don't know what is. He goes on to talk about how the game doesn't know how to build and mantain tension but that's clearly not true because whenever I looked at the blue haired girl's face the sexual tension went up the roof and I wasn't even reading the game. He also complains about the game giving info to you (while clearly complaining about the game not giving info for you to grab on just one paragraph earlier) but it's totally ok because the problem is that the game didn't give you info the way he wanted it to give, which at this point is pretty clear to all smart readers that he's just looking for excuses to complain about this masterpiece and he doesn't care about truth at all. He talks some stuff about the characters but at this point it's pretty clear that he's a biased writer and I dunno who's who by name so we'll just skip over that. Here's some girls in maid outfits showing the game truly knows what's what. Then, I shit you not, this review goes completely grammar nazi and starts talking about all this random english shit literally no one other than an english literature college freshman would care about, not even his teachers, for what is like half of the entire review. I didn't count the words so it might be less but I had to scroll my screen to skip over that garbage fire so half of the review is probably correct. He goes on to talk about how he checked the japanese script and found out the localization was nonsense, but that's clearly untrue because we already proved he doesn't know any japanese in this rebuttal so no need to spend any more time on that. Now, even this guy can't deny the game is top tier 10/10 master artwork with pretty good ost, so he makes up some excuse about how the game's writing is bad so it's complete trash because it's a visual novel and you're suppoosed to read visual novels. Not true. The VN community in the west started with people who didn't know a single word of japanese buying porn games they'd fap to because images and voices are good enough. If writing was also so important, might as well not even have visuals in the first place. Anyway I think it's pretty clear FuwaReviews hates visual novels, doesn't want people to read the good ones in the west and wants everyone to read pretentious hipster book-ey shit instead. Because they took the effort to make fake propaganda about how this game is bad, I think it's blindingly obvious that it's 10/10 masterpiece and the best VN of all time. My face right now is just like the text below this loli's which is why I made her my avatar. Peace.

Here is a list of VNs officially released in english, I have now added all the VNs I could think of so the list is pretty much done. If I have missed anything it would be nice to know. The reason I am doing this is that there are a lot of officially released VNs in the west and it is hard to have control over everything that is released. I will update the VNs that have released the current year every month and the ones released the last year every 2nd month. Because of this I have added (year) on titles released in english during either 2018 or 2019. The ones that released in english before the previous year will have their amount of votes and scores updated each year. Orange text means confirmed for an official english release while yellow text means that a part has been released but not the entire VN. I have also made a list with the ones with physical release, this list is sorted the same way as this but also has info on where the titles can be bought and if it is available List of physical english releases of VNs MangaGamer (Store) Sekai Project (Homepage)/Denpasoft (Store) JAST USA (Store) Front Wing (Homepage) NekoNyan (Store) Sol Press (Homepage) Visual Art's Fruitbat Factory (Store) MoeNovel (Burn in hell) Cherry Kiss Games (Homepage) Winged Cloud Degica Aksys Games (Store) XSEED Games (Store) NIS America (Store NA, Store EU) Others (Japanese) Others (not japanese) Himeya Soft (Bankrupt) Hirameki International (Quit the VN market) SakuraGame/Paradise Project (Machine translated, do not buy from them)

Here's all your hatless avatars back. Personally, I'm going to change mine back when the liturgical Christmas season ends, because I'm not a heathen. @1P1A @Akshay @alpacaman @bakauchuujin @Canicheslayer @Dergonu @Dreamysyu @Emi @Funyarinpa @Happiness+ @LemiusK @MaggieROBOT @mitchhamilton @SeniorBlitz @Silvz @tahu157 @Thyndd @UnlimitedMoeWorks @wei123 @Zakamutt (Man, the @ function is buggy in every way imaginable. Fix that shizzle, Tay.)

...the Era of Obnoxious Shilling for EVNs! It's been exactly a year since I wrote my first post around here and God damn it, it's hard to believe it has only been that long. This site seriously rearranged the way I'm spending my free time and provided me with tons of fun and a satisfying outlet to channel my questionable writing. I won't be doing shoutouts this time, because there are just too many people to list and I would most likely miss someone that deserves being mentioned, so I just want to thank all of you for putting up with me, and simply being awesome in this awesome little community. :3 My only regret is that in all this time I didn't find a way to contribute to the main site and help with the permanent crisis there... But, hell, I'm not going anywhere, so there's a good chance opportunities will still show themselves eventually. One can dream, at least... And, however things go, I hope I'll be able to do a few more of these Fuwanniversaries in the future.

@Fred the Barber

Huuuuuuuuh... I see many things that are absolutely wrong with your statement. First, really there's no translation quality/choice drama in other otaku niches? I've seen people going apeshit over minor details in anime translations and inconsistencies between the fan and official versions. On the one hand, there'll always be purists that are demanding top quality every time and on the other, there will be botched or poor-quality translation on both the fan and official side of things. The more choice and comparison people have, the more likely they are to criticize underperforming projects - when fan translators were your only hope for playing pretty much any VNs, you were less likely to complain about their work than now, when they compete with a fairly rich selection of professional releases. I things it's even somewhat legit to argue that nowadays there's little sense in translating a VN unless you can do it well. The second, do you know about many EVNs being translated to Japanese? People actually caring about those? It's a non-topic, but I would be surprised if Japanese VN fans didn't have a problem with poor translations - they aren't used to awful localizations and don't treat them as "facts of life" like Western otakus were forced to by turd-quality products offered to them on a regular basis. Demanding quality seems like a pretty reasonable standard, especially for commercial products. And the VN fandom today is not reliant on fan translations anymore and people's attitudes towards those are not any kind of "crucial barrier" for its growth. Also, there are many other reasons why fan translations are pretty much dying out - people that once done them professionalizing or moving on with their lives is the main one and there's no going back from this. What's left is the official publishers, and if you suggest we shouldn't take those up to highest scrutiny as their clients, that's pretty much saying you want them to screw you over with subpar services. Well, you're allowed to act against your own self-interest of course, but that doesn't look like a healthy narrative.

Hello world, been a long while. So, I've been busy, real busy. But, it's finally going to pay off. We're almost at the goal, and I'd like to thank all of those over here at Fuwa who have stuck around with me until now, be it from the start, or when this project started to gain traction. Thank you so much. Now then, until next time, when we'll be releasing the full game, after 2,5 and almost three years. Also haven't sold out. https://arcadeotic.wixsite.com/euphemictl/single-post/2018/09/22/Final-Stretch

I've been considering this for some time, but it has suddenly become a reality. To be blunt, I've come to my limit when it comes to playing pure SOL games. Oh, I can still enjoy many of them, but if you asked me whether I can look at them without my resentment of 'normal' SOL content blinding me, the answer is no. If I have to read through one more template date scene or see another osananajimi climb through the window from next door, I'm going to start tearing out the last remaining hairs atop my head. *coughs* Ahem, now that I've got that out, it needs to be said that I've been doing this since September of 2012... a ridiculous amount of time to be playing roughly 80% of all non-nukige VNs that come out (I'm figuring those I dropped or just couldn't play because they were just that bad into the twenty percent). Just to be clear, I will still continue to play VNs and comment on/review them in this blog. However, I will no longer play as many outside my tastes, nor will I go out of my way to seek gems from companies I hate reading from. I realized while I was playing Koisaku (Ensemble's latest game), that a few years ago, I would have read this game without any real problems, and I wouldn't even have blinked at the crap that now drives me up the wall. Oh sure, Ensemble's base quality has fallen massively, but when I took a step back, this is actually one of the better amongst their more recent games, with plenty of indications of real stories for the heroines in the background. However, I found I just couldn't tolerate it. It hit me in the date scene that occurs in the common route... I have no tolerance for date scenes at all anymore. Scenes like that exist for every heroine in every SOL VN, and they all turn out in almost an identical fashion. Reading it, even though it was basically a 'friend date', was like dragging my brain through mud. I just couldn't do it. I promised myself that I wouldn't BS myself on this particular matter years ago... and I knew the limit was coming. I just didn't realize that it would be this soon. So, I have to announce that this is the end of my VN of the Month column. Now, all that remains is my Random VNs and whatever VNs I choose to play each month. I will continue to play what I'm interested in, and that will probably include slice-of-life at times. However, I will no longer play SOL out of a sense of duty to my readers. My original reasons for starting VN of the Month When I first started Clephas' VN of the Month, it was because vndb gives nothing to you for info on their games beyond poor tls of the game summary from Getchu, character profiles, and sometimes tags (that might or might not be accurate). I felt that that didn't do most games justice, and I hated the way I had to go into a game blind on so many occasions. As such, I started putting up commentaries on just what kind of VN I was playing, with few or no spoilers. This was a need that, at the time, was not being fulfilled (and as far as I know, still isn't, since most reviewers include major spoilers because they are inconsiderate). Over time, my routine each month started with figuring out which games weren't nukige and which I would play first... and picking out which one was the best after I played them (the latter of course being entirely a matter of my opinion, informed as it might be). However, it is time to set down my burden. I tried handing off my work to others, and that worked for a while (thanks to @Dergonu@fun2novel@BookwormOtaku@Kiriririri for their help over the last year - yes, even you, Kiriririri). In the end, though, I'm just one man... and one middle-aged man with increasingly bad health isn't going to be able to keep this up any longer. Heck, I'm amazed i kept going this long. I do hope someone else takes up the torch of at least informing people of what to expect in newer games (and not just the ones from popular companies), but that isn't my job anymore. Thanks for reading, Clephas

Online anime discussions seem obsessed with individual anime: there can only be one best anime (and it’s Rakugo, fite me irl). But rather than focusing on specific anime, could we look at what binds them together? I’m talking about anime fans. No anime fan watches only one anime, they watch lots, so if we chart the fandom overlap between anime we could how different anime series group together. Do they group together based on source material? The type of genre? The release date? Let’s find out! I also posted this here where I can embed images in the post and I think it's a little easier to read. The Analysis Process (skip this section if uninterested) First, we need some data on anime fans. Fortunately, we don’t need to conduct an extensive survey, anime fans are happy to publicly catalog their tastes on sites like MyAnimeList.net. To get a random sampling of the active anime fandom, I downloaded the completed anime and profile data of anyone logging into MAL on a couple of days in January. I got data for 7883 users who had watched 1,417,329 anime series in total (enough for 4 lifetimes of constant anime watching). I filtered out anything that wasn’t a TV series or movie, and any anime with fewer than 1,000 fans in our dataset, leaving us with 380 anime. I then merged anime entries of the same series together, leaving 268 anime to chart. To map out the fandom’s tastes, I modeled each anime like it was a beachball floating in a swimming pool. Each beachball had several elastic strings tied to it of varying strength. The strongest string was connected to the anime/beachball that it shared the most fans with. The next strongest string went to the anime/beachball it had the second most fans with, and so on. This way anime with lots of overlapping fans would be drawn together. But to prevent the confused mess of a squeaky beachball bondage orgy, each beachball also bobbed up and down in the pool of water, causing waves that pushed away anything that got too close. I let this simulation run until it reached an equilibrium point where the pull of the strings balanced against the push of the waves. The result would hopefully be an anime/beachball web where groups of anime with large fandom overlaps formed clusters. The Fandom Map After warming myself on my overheating computer processors, the simulation finally ended with the result below. The font size of each anime name is proportional to how popular it is, and the red lines represent the fandom overlap/elastic strings between beachballs. A higher resolution version is available here: here Eek, that’s a lot to take in! At first glance there are a few obvious clusters like the Ghibli movies in the bottom right, but it can be hard to identify what common themes are linking these anime. So what do we do? MAL tags to the rescue! (Surely this is the only time those tags have ever been useful). We can use the MAL genre tags the highlight different genres and see if they group together. The green dots show which anime have the genre tag in the title. What had once seemed a single unified blob is shown to be split into multiple clusters, but what does it tell us? Each cluster should be judged on two metrics: self-cohesion and its proximity/overlap to other clusters. Self-cohesion is how tightly grouped a cluster is. The more tightly grouped it is, the more fans tend to stay within that genre and pick anime based on it. So for example, the ecchi cluster is quite tightly grouped in the top left area, telling us that the inclusion (or lack of) ecchi content is important to those fans in choosing what to watch. Alternatively the lack of cohesion can tell us something too, drama anime are spread out all over the place, suggesting there isn’t a unified group of fans specifically seeking out drama content like there is for romance, slice of life, or action anime. The proximity to other clusters tells us where fandoms overlap. For example, the thriller and ecchi clusters are at opposite ends, suggesting that generally, the fandoms don’t overlap much. However psychological, mystery, and thriller anime all seem to overlap quite well. It seems the most prominent split in the fandom is between romance and action anime, with the two of them taking up significant portions of the medium, but overlapping only in ecchi anime. Recency Bias As well as plotting genres, we can also see if the release date of an anime influences its position. If fans tend to pick anime based on what’s currently airing, that’d show up with anime of the same year grouping together. While the middle area is quite mixed, the latest anime series from 2017 cluster significantly on the left side, suggesting anime aired in the same season do tend to clump together with a lot of fan overlap, but only while the anime is less than a year old. After that, the rest of the anime fandom who are pickier about the anime they try outnumber those who watch all the latest series. Fandom age Using the publicly listed birthdays of our MAL users, we can see which anime tends to attract the oldest users. The age map is almost a mirror image of the recency bias map, with the unsurprising result that older anime tends to have older fans, and the most recent anime have the youngest fandom. Gender differences The number of women on MAL is likely undercounted as only 17% of those listing their gender state they’re female, but we can still analyse how the gender ratio changes between anime clusters. Note that green nodes don’t mean a female majority (only 3 anime had a female majority fandom: Yuri on Ice, Free, and Ouran Koukou Host Club), it just means the ratio is higher than average. There is clearly a gender divide in the anime each gender is watching. The female fans seem to gravitate more towards psychological stories and the Ghibli movies. Unsurprisingly, ecchi stuff is watched almost entirely by males. What’s more surprising is how few female fans there are among the recent releases cluster, suggesting female fans are less likely to follow the latest anime season. MAL also offers a non-binary gender option. Only 1% of those displaying their gender picked non-binary, totaling just 61 users in my dataset, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in this result, but I was curious about the result... It’s generally more mixed than the stark male-female divide, although the non-binary fan hotspots align much more with females than males, peaking on Yuri on Ice, Free, and Ouran Koukou Host Club. Age ratings Just for fun, we also tried plotting the age ratings of anime. As would be expected, the R+ nudity ratings are clustered in the harem area, the younger ratings are mostly from the Ghibli films, and the R-17 violence ratings align with the action and psychological/thriller cluster. Unrated anime I have an obsession with rating anime, I must rate them all! But some users mark anime as “completed” without ever entering a score (what’s wrong with you?). I tried plotting the ratio of such unrated anime to see if they formed a pattern. Turns out there’s a bit of a pattern here… ( ͡º ͜ʖ ͡º) The more ecchi it is, the less likely fans are to rate it. I guess they must scratch their rating compulsion itch through other means. ----------------------------------------- I hope you liked our little analysis. It wouldn’t be possible without the help of Part-time Storier (https://parttimestorier.tumblr.com/), /u/8cccc9, and /u/Crabspite. Thank you all~ I always love discussing this stuff, so feel free to contact me here on Fuwanovel, tumblr, and twitter. My next post (in a week or two) is going to focus on female fans and see how the female fandom’s tastes cluster.

As a Japanese Otaku, I, was hugely affected by VNs/eroge in my youth, have wanted to organize what I experienced on VNs and the culture around them in Japan. There are some critical texts on VNs and their history much better than mine on the Internet or books, but sometimes personal view like this could be useful, so I'm writing this now. As you might already know, a thinker or critic Hiroki Azuma actively was writing on Otaku culture from around 1993 to 2007, and he was surely in a central position of criticism about some kind of modern Japanese popular culture. Simply putting, he is a Postmodern theorist studied under other modern Japanese thinkers. As for me, I was a late teen and interested in contemporary art or paintings (I liked Jackson Pollock and Gerhard Richter) at that time, knew about him around 2004-2005 through researching Takashi Murakami, a famous Japanese artist. Those days, maybe because Azuma was impressed by the advent of a VN (Shizuku, by Leaf, 1996) and its rapid growth of narrative and structure (e.g., YU-NO, ONE, Kanon, Tsukihime), he published one book referring VNs from a renowned publisher Kodansha in 2001 and two self-publishing books only about VNs in 2004. I used to read his book and website repeatedly then, and inevitably, fascinated by old school VNs that had a queer, immature yet beautiful allure. Sadly enough, the golden age can't last forever. Around the end of 2005, Azuma said that the VNs' craze ended, and started concentrating on social criticism. When I think of it now, he might lack a responsibility to the culture he led in some sense. I was able to figure out what he meant, however. Around that time, Type-Moon changed into a company from a doujin circle, CLANNAD was released without adult contents, Leaf/AQUAPLUS gradually became interested in the all-aged console market. If I might say, VNs grew into a full-fledged genre of Otaku culture, and at the same time, it had to lose verdant attraction that only a growing genre can have. (I must say I would prefer modern VNs at present, and modern VNs tend to have great quality - especially graphics quality.) Anyhow, I needed to find my own criterion of what VNs are great for me, since I almost relied on his opinion, in other words, I had to stand on my own feet as an independent Otaku. In the end, what criterion have I found out? In short, I regard a character design as important, in particular, cuteness, glamour, and how to paint characters (not only drawing). I like paintings after all. The technique of Bishoujo pictures (Moe-e) surely has a fashion, and I have been wondering where cuteness and the modernity of Bishoujo girls arise from. Um, I'm being derailed a little, so, I will stop droning on. When I get a definite idea about something, I would like to write again. Thank you for reading!

Despite there being a few good editing blogs on Fuwanovel, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of translation blogs. I think part of the reason for this is that editors in the fan translation scene are often doing things the translator could very well be doing themselves, often to the detriment of the final product. Look at, say, the “big back” entry Fred wrote. Now tell me why this issue couldn’t be avoided back at the translation stage. There are two reasons why you would do this: one, you don’t know Japanese well enough to understand what is actually meant, so you put down whatever it says literally. In this case, the sane way to handle the issue is to ask someone who knows Japanese better than you for advice. Two, you’re just lazy. Who actually thinks “the date changed” sounds right in English? An edge case of this is prioritizing speed; Ixrec and MDZ* both prioritized speed and neither had very good results to show for it, but they did complete things. Personally I still think this is ultimately lazy; it is significantly more simple to translate literally than to try to actually write well. In this case, ask yourself if you really want to produce a shitty translation. What I’m trying to get at is this: if you actually want to produce something good, you can’t just leave writing the thing up to the editor. Editors are not miracle workers; they have to deal with what they’re given. Furthermore, many editors working on fan translations, and well, translations period, are not very good at the job. Any time you leave something bad in, there is always the possibility of it sticking around in the final product. I’m not saying you have to be perfect. I’m saying this: for the love of visual novels, try. If you ask me, before you hand your script to the editor, you should have already done an editing pass on it. Or two. The lines should connect with each other rather than float like islands in a sea of prose, there should be at least an attempt at character voice, and all ugly stock translations should be kawari-fucking-mashita’d, much like the 日付 at midnight, with extreme prejudice. Sometimes you’re still going to come up short. Sometimes it just won’t sound right whatever you try. That’s when you should pray that your editor knows better than you – leave a note at the line explaining the problem, move on, and hope to hell that your editor is actually good enough to work it out. That’s what the editor is for. The editor should not be translating from weeb to English. The editor should not be doing your job. *Its not just the fan translation scene that does this, by the way – there are companies, like Aksys, which demand its translators write a colorless literal translation to be punched up by superstar editors later. Unsurprisingly, they’ve put out some real stinkers; I have a lot of respect for Ben Bateman’s work on 999 for this reason. View the full article

No, and that's why it's good.

I am here to announce that the most recent announcement of an announcement was announced in error. Unfortunately, we're still making the finishing touches on some of the promo materials. We may have a more accurate announcement of an announcement at a later date, but not until we know exactly what day we can make said announcement. I am also announcing that we will be much more careful about announcing announcements going forward. We are very sorry for the disappointment this brings. It was an honest mistake, and we'll do better in the future. We won't say "we'll never announce an announcement ever again!" because it's honestly very helpful to prepare people and get them paying attention, rather than surprise announcing stuff. We promise we'll be more responsible about this from now on, though.

well.. after long time im became silent reader finally i decided to make fuwanovel's profile and i think i should introduce myself tbh it's my first time making profile so i dont have vndb or mal account, or should i make it ? im a fan of moege and i hope you guys can recommend me some good stuff nice to meet you all and sorry for my bad english

Today we are going to celebrate Hachiroku's Route completion! Be prepared later today!

The biggest one: We need to stop treating VNs like they're Video Games Lite. I think we're all guilty of this (myself included), but by doing so, we're effectively limiting VNs' potential reader base to just gamers. An assumption I see often is that gameplay VNs like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa are inherently more newbie-friendly than normal VNs or especially kinetic novels. This only makes sense if you're assuming that you're trying to market VNs to gamers. I'm not saying that it's bad to try to get gamers into VNs, but why should we limit ourselves to that? Why are they the only audience that we're trying to get? Other groups who might be interested in visual novels: Regular novel readers. Yes, they still exist. This is such an obvious thing to me (after all, we're trying to promote visual novels) that it almost amazes me that almost nobody considers that people who like to read might be interested in...well, reading. Comics fans, especially fans of indie comics. We're seeing a tiny bit of overlap between indie comics and EVNs already. I read a short yuri VN named Serre by Adrienne Bazir not too long ago that does really nice things with CGs and sprite animations (especially considering she did everything except the music/sound effects). There's also an interactive graphic novel (which I haven't had the opportunity to buy yet) that came out recently named It Will Be Hard that I've seen get a good reception. I don't know if it'd be called a VN per se, but surely it'd be of interest to people who are interested in interactive storytelling? There's a lot of things that our mediums could learn from each other if we bothered to expand outside our normal horizons. People with disabilities who can't/don't want to play "normal" video games. After all, 99% of VNs have no interactivity beyond clicking to advance the text and possibly making choices. This makes them inherently more accessible than 99% of video games. There are some things to keep in consideration (for example, making sure you can access the menu easily; adding screen reader or text-to-speech support for visually-impaired readers; adding an option to use a dyslexic-friendly font like OpenDyslexic), but overall, making a VN accessible is much easier than making your average video game accessible. More things that would help VNs' reputation and encourage people to check out the medium: Stop pretending that porn is a necessary component to VNs. I'm not saying "drop the porn" (that'd be hypocritical of me, since I've wished for more 18+ otome in the past), but it's off-putting to a lot of people, and a lot of time it's shoehorned in anyway. Sex in VNs should be treated the same way as it is in books: some books have sex in them, in some books (erotica) sex is the whole point, but you don't need to have sex in a novel for it to be considered literature, nor does having a sex scene in it automatically disqualify a book from being literature. Longer is not always better. I personally like long stories, but a lot of people just don't have the time (or, yes, attention span) for a 50-hour epic. There's value in shorter VNs that tell a good story not just despite, but because of their length...similarly, by holding longer works up on a pedestal, we're encouraging creators to add pointless shit to pad the length of their stories, which just wastes everyone's time. We need to support diverse VNs by diverse creators. Diverse settings, diverse characters, diverse plots, diverse artwork. Basically have something for everyone. There's nothing wrong with high school stories, but it's boring when it seems like that's the only setting that people will read. Part of this is supporting EVNs and EVN creators, who may not have the budgets that the big Japanese eroge creators do, but who are still doing cool stuff. (There's this weird perception that EVNs try too hard to be like JVNs and are all set in Japanese high schools, which hasn't been the case for years? Katawa Shoujo and DDLC aren't representative of the EVN scene as a whole, for a lot of reasons. I will say that there's a disproportionately high number of anime-style EVNs, but even then there are plenty of exceptions. That's just the first few I found when going through my VNDB collection.) I think the reaction to this year's AX announcements really shows how much pushback there can be against stories that don't fit into the mold of "normal" eroge: JAST USA announced three BL VNs, and MangaGamer announced one BL and one yuri VN, and people are complaining about this year's AX being "overly gay," or about how MG has supposedly "abandoned" the "traditional eroge audience" (never mind that they also announced two Rance games and already have plenty of "normal" eroge in the pipeline) and is now a "fujoshi paradise." I understand the appeal of self-inserting, but some of my favorite stories have been about people very different from me--in fact, a fully-fleshed character who's very different from me can be easier to relate to than a blank-slate protagonist. Basically, if I can read through VNs with straight male protagonists and manage to enjoy them, a straight guy can read through an otome or BL game without...dying, or whatever you think will happen if you touch something not aimed at straight men. Don't promote lolicon/shotacon stuff. This creeps out the vast majority of people, myself included. Maitetsu was a mistake. Just because it's legal (in the US) doesn't mean we have to support it.

DISCLAIMER: I didn't ask for anyone's permission before deciding who's gonna be killed here, sorry actually not sorry about that. That's a dankier representation of these guys that may or may not reflect how they are in real life. I tried to use you guys' avatar or username as base for your appearances and everyone using a cute girl avatar must now be grateful. This entire story had zero proofreading and makes zero sense. Support the official Danganronpa release if you want a quality story, and the patch for the PSP is the best version for the first game, thanks for asking. Dreamysyu wakes up in his usual third seat of the roll beside the window, the setting sun coloring their majestic white hair orange. Just with this tiny introduction we can already see how they have all the needed traits to be the Ultimate Protagonist, and that's why we're following them now. They are already used to have a narrator describing every single thought that pop in their head. "No, and please stop doing that." was what they are thinking but honestly I don't give a damn. Anyway, seeing that the school was deserted, Dreamysyu's first thought was that they overslept and missed the entirety of philosophy class, that happened to be their favorite subject but not the author's so it was natural it was skipped here. If that was the case, it was almost time for horse riding club activities with their cute kouhai. Or just the kouhai riding because they're the protagonist. But as soon as they stepped outside they noticed something. The school was deserted. Not a single soul or background character was in sight. It's almost like... they were transported to an eroge school that's only populated by the main cast. Looking outside the window, Dreamysyu saw an unnatural amount of cherry trees in full bloom in the middle of July and the ocean not far in every single direction meaning they were in some non existing island near Japan. Way too eroge. Now the kouhai riding scene seems to be even closer to their grasp. Oh yeah, but most likely there's no kouhai anymore. Why even live as a protagonist like this? Right as Dreamysyu thought at least one girl must be around and everything would go back to normal by the end of the story so no need to panic... they heard voices. More than one. Coming from the auditorium... "My harem!" wasn't what they are thinking, but I can mess with them a little bit~ Dreamysyu opened the door and found 15 other bizarre students, almost all of them somewhat angry. "Tsk, another one?" someone said. "This must be the last one." another one that played Danganronpa before answered. Despite the hostile atmosphere, and Dreamysyu hostile appearance itself, a person approaches them. A cute girl with blue twintails, that managed to stay cheerful despite everything. Well, nothing happened yet, maybe that's why. "Hiiiiiii, and welcome to the Survivors' Club!" they already decided everybody else was killed, figures. "I'm Dergonu and I'll be glad to help you if you have any questions!" Dreamysyu was ready to raise an eyebrow but stopped. Dergonu. They remember that name. They are the Ultimate Mod, someone that did so good a job as a mod that they pretty much wiped out three forums into oblivion, such was the extension of the shitposting there. So mostly likely they know some behind the scenes stuff, it wouldn't hurt to stick around them... "No, I'm the one that truly knows everything." said a bespectacled dark haired woman with a hat that I'm guessing is a beret. Wait, did they just answered the narration? "Fiddle-samaaaaaaaaaaaa!! <3" yelled Dergonu before Fiddle could yet again answer the narration. And that name explained everything. Fiddle was known as the Ultimate Mastermind, said to have manipulated dozen other fanfics Fuwa users dared to write. Dreamysyu asked if this one would be any different, and Fiddle promptly shaked his head in a no, maybe spoiling the whole thing in the first chapter. "I can, and I will." "Wow, way to ruin the mystery. As expected of someone who liked Noble Works." said angrily a white haired guy with a gas mask. Although he's also white haired and faceless to boot, he wasn't the main character, maybe because there's way too much moe around for him to care about it. Because of that display, Dreamysyu recognized him in an instant: that was VirginSmasher, the Ultimate EOP. Said to have read all english non moege VNs in a spam of a single month, the experiment clearly corrupted his soul and it shows. In fact, he was already displeased to being forced to participate of such third-rate fanfic. "1/10 VN already, if we can even call this that." Virgin wasn't the only one that was displeased, that was indeed quite enough salt in the room. But the person that said the last line takes the cake. solidbatman, the Ultimate Salt. Even the Black Sea tried to steal the title from him, and lost. They can't drop out of the story because only I can decide that, but they already rate this a 1/10 in the middle of the prologue. Sasuga, jeez. And for all effects, solidbatman looks exactly like Batman because everything is better with Batman. "D-d-don't give it such a poor score so fast! After you read all scenes and read all text, I'm sure you'll give it at least a 8! And it does improve after the third choice of the second common route!" said a horned guy, going all technical. He had a huge encyclopedia in his arms, and he seemed to be looking at it right at this moment to know what exactly he was supposed to say next. Needless to say, that could only be SeniorBlitz, the Ultimate Guide, the guy said to be the only one that read the entire "book of answers for everything" that he now holds, and not just the tl;dr version that consisted of a tiny post-it with a 42 on it. "To be fair, you have to go multiple extra playthrough to fully understand Ste... I mean, this fic." said a cool with an almost zombie expression red haired girl with an out of place christmas hat. They were pretty well know, even more now that Steins;Gate 0 is airing. "Oh, it's Kurisu-chan, the Ultimate Tsundere!" said a poor soul, asking to be berated. "It's ULTIMATE STEINS;GATE FAN! I'm not even a Tsundere, how can I even be the Ultimate one! -Taku!" and then they proceed to talk about the last episode of S;G 0 unprompted just to prove their point of being the Ultimate S;G fan. Whoever was watching it too joined the conversation eventually. "This problem here does not change the fact that we have lots of Ultimates here." said an adorable blonde girl with a magical girl outfit. littleshogun, the Ultimate Magical Girl, seemed unfazed by everyone else, probably because of their experience with weird encounters with evil forces during all of their years working as a magical girl. "The purity of this magical girl... stirs the darkness. O Old Ones, lord of tentacled infernal beasts... I hope I can hold your thirst back with these hands of mine..." calmly stated a long haired blond, majestic and evil-looking man, even if that was in no way a calm matter. Even if he said that he hopes he can hold something or other, he probably can, single handed. That was the power of Clephas, the Ultimate Chuuni. He saw things, he did things... Even the Old Ones must be scared of him at this point. "Hey hey, enough with all this weebness. Moe kids already are a bit more than what I can handle, don't include tentacles too!" said another person from the pissed crowd. They were a beautiful brunette in a wedding dress that had all the right of being pissed if this story prevented them to marry his favorite boy. Oh well. The judge of anything weeb with strong sarcasm that I will not emulate all too well, probably, the new angry person is Zander, the Ultimate Outsider. "I might add that probably a weeb that gave me my Ultimate name, I'm not outside anything. Well, maybe outside a list of people going to jail, hell or both..." "You DO know that tentacle are a common japanese trope that's almost a history class on weebness if you actually look for the origin of the correlation between Magical Girls and tentacles, right?" said a glasses guy that looked all so smart. His face screams confidence, as expected of an Ultimate, but also passion for all the knowledge he acquired in the filthy pool of weeb hobbies. That was Pl_Lesiak, the man who looked at weebness in the eyes and came back victorious. Although he likes western weeb inspired things a bit too much, that's why his title quickly changed to Ultimate Westerner. Okay now, this title seems like he did some cowboy movies, and that's precisely why I decided to give him twin pistols in this story. The reason for that can be because a lot of people thought the same and then he went "why not?", I don't know. "'Twas indeed a bloody confusion." thought the red-claded young man besides Lesiak, after he told him his tale some time during my narration. He also had a dignified air and a posture as elegant and powerful as someone doing a gentle motion to raise their dead servants with necromancy. It couldn't be anyone else other than Mr Poltroon, the Ultimate Gentleman. And if someone have a better idea of how to write a gentleman without him sounding like an old brit, be my guest. "But now everything is A-Okay!" said a bubbly blue haired maid. Dreamysyu approached them because for a moment I almost forgot to use my protagonist for anything. But was it really necessary to ask who are they? Everyone there knew Kenshin_sama, the Ultimate Isekaier. Travelling to different worlds time and time again, the world within this tale is no different, so they were actually excited to explore one more world. They used their smartphone that they got in yet another world to take a lot of photos already and post everything in Jun Inoue's thread. Without them noticing, Kurisu-chan used the chance to complain about Re:Zero for a bit. "(ᗒᗨᗕ)" said another Ultimate, agreeing with Kenshin. Not that Zander allowed themselves to understand such a weebty so alien and far from proper english. Not that the cute pink haired girl cared, they just continued going （＾ω＾） around. If someone asked for the name of the tiny pink haired moe, they'll probably answer (⁎˃ᆺ˂) or something, so Dreamysyu did his protagonist part and told everyone they're Kiriririri, the Ultimate Moeblob. "I'm going to vomit if the happiness mood keeps going for too long. Can we kill each other yet?" said another short girl with some curtained bangs and pink eyes, spoiling yet another plot point if we can believe Fiddle's words that they already spoiled one. Stars appeared in their eyes as soon as they said the word "murder", what made them wave around happily, knocking Senior's encyclopedia on the floor on purpose just because. The book was so thick it could have opened a hole in the floor, but I'm not letting them escape this easily, so it just made a loud sound like whatever an elephant's fart sounds like. Even if they just look like a bully for now, in fact Ranzo is the Ultimate Bastard, hellbent on destruction and everyone else's disgrace. They couldn't simply leave all the fun to Clephas, or all the hatred to batman. They wanted a time to shine, even if killing everyone else was necessary for this. It actually was necessary, so of course they were enjoying this fic, and sadly maybe they're the only one. "I must agree that some people here are way too happy, even though everyone in school suddenly vanished and we're now trapped in a cheap imitation of the facility in some weird island and..." he actually said 34 more lines, but let's cut to the chase, shall we? tymmur, the Ultimate Orator, also had issues with how slow this story was going. Said to have recited the whole bible, Rewrite and France Shoujo before breathing in again, he looked like a wise old man in a glittered rainbow shirt that would totally be followed by some slave lolis if those still existed in the school. Well, there's Kiri, but I digress. "How horrible! How could a nice guy do something like this?" though the reader, but you need not worry. He's actually pretty nice with shotas, especially if they hook up with other shotas, he's just like this with 2D prostitute lolis that aren't protected by any 3D law. "For the sake of my sanity, I'll disagree." said Zander, what prompted tymmur to say another 67 lines, but since this chapter is almost over I'll skip it again. "Pardon my interruption of thy argument, sir, but I'm afraid we are not alone in this school..." said Poltroon, with a fierce expression of wanting to draw his sword if he had one. An annoying nihihi echoed through the room and it was coming... from the monitor on the wall that suddenly went on with a stream! "I see your all getting along! Yay! Welcome to the..." "*You're." Fiddle corrected before the naked girl could utter another mistake. Still feeling bad, eventually they introduced themselves as Mitchnomi, a 1/3 bear, a 1/3 rabbit, a 1/3 comic relif, all bad. They are doing the role of Monomi so naturaly they got shooed away not long after by the students. "KYAAAAAAAAAA!" screamed the rabbit girl, that apparently got shooed away in the other side of the monitor too. "...Can we just pretend this didn't happen and go back to... whatever was happening in the story?" batman asked and then everyone remembered what Poltroon said. It was really just about Mitchnomi? For once, everyone shut up and paid attention to the surrounding sounds. Something... was coming from the corridor. A stupid laugh soon echoed. "Upupupu... Pupupu... Upupupupupu!" "Da fuck is this?" is what Dreamysyu should have asked at the very beginning of the story. "Upupupu... Upupupwahahahahahahaha!" the laugh got even louder. Well, of course, the person laughing just entered the room, flames erupting behind them for whatever epic reason. Ranzo found it amazing and set fire to the curtain too. Clephas wanted to summon some things too, but decided against because it was still too early in the story for final boss moments. "Who... are you?" asked Dergonu, hoping for something not stupid. "Bitch please, who else could I be? The one and only, powerful and sexy, MAGGIEKUMA!" "I am not seeing a bear here." littleshogun pointed to the pretty boy that's now in front of the kids. They had white hair and black clothes so it totally fits the mono part of the name, even the 2B plushie they're carrying fits, but noooo I had to pick the kuma part. You can all agree with me that Monomaggie doesn't sound just as good. "Who caaaaaaaaaaaaaaares if I'm not a bear! Moe is the new thing, so hopefully pretty boys are here to stay." Maggiekuma explained why they decided to stick with the 9S in their avatar and not 2B. "They will, if you choose the second choice and then the fourth after [SPOILERS] dies! That way, you'll rule the world and make everyone likes whatever you want" Senior just gave me a dangerous but awesome idea. "∠(^ー^)" Kiri doesn't seem to mind. "Good thing I didn't have any expectation for this story." Virgin already gave up. "But you can end all of this... Killing everyone!" dramatic close up in Maggiekuma's face. "All according to the keikaku!" said Ranzo with a grim, even if they didn't really have a fucking plan. NEXT TIME: The rules of the deathgame and... Someone dies! But that's a twist!

Persona 5 was a game that I was expecting for a long time, given that I'm a fan of the series and Persona 4 was pretty good. Too bad it quickly earned the title of "biggest disappointment of the year" for me. The way people were praising it didn't help either because I was expecting a masterpiece and found something so-so at best. The epitome of style over substance, I played half the game to see that everything I liked in that game some older game in the franchise already did it, and did it better. But enough of those unrelated complaints, as this blog is about gay things. So here comes another one of my many nitpicks: I don't play Persona to self-insert myself in the MC, so I couldn't care less about not having a female MC (although that would be super cool, and at the same time disappointing, as ATLUS let it very clear that the last time they gave us the option her storyline was NOT canon), but please at least give me the option to pick any love interest I want! This is optional, you know, that thing that's you're not forced to pick to go on, so it shouldn't offend anyone, right? Wrong. Have your blank protagonist that have no info about him except that he's heterosexual. Have fun. I wouldn't really write a salty blog post about this if at least the girls were as interesting and cool as they were in Persona 4 (even if best bro Yosuke was still the best pairing, just saying). If. The girls from your party are all (okay, maybe not Haru, because I didn't met her) a stereotyped bore, their lines are either predictable or inconsequential things that could have being said by anyone. Okay, that's not only the girls, even your best bro is just a generic bro. And the one girl that aren't in my party that could be a good love interest stole 100000 yen from me when I was barely being able to buy all guns from the shop so of course I wouldn't give that witch a piece of my love. There was only two characters that managed to make me care about them: Yusuke, the eccentric ikemen, and Mishima, our loyal fanboy. But the game only let us be best friends forever, now I'll die for you, but kiss nah that's too much. Game, stop cockblocking my character!!! But I don't wanna be just friends... But it's not that there's no gay character in this game! We go to Shinjuku, and the Shinjuku Ni-chōme area is a thing after all. But eeerrr... the only gay characters I met in Shinjuku was a very stereotyped pair that appear just for a stereotyped joke scene. Twice even. It wasn't particularly funny in the first time, ATLUS, repeating it definetly won't make it funnier. It actually just rub salt in my wounds because you won't let me date Yusuke! But what happened with ATLUS these past years? They let me date my childhood friend Jun (that's pretty much Yusuke but more shy and more gay) back in Persona 2. Even when the game didn't have friend simulator mechanics. That game also had Hitler as one of the final bosses in a way that makes sense in the plot, so I guess they could never make a game as amazing as that. Best Persona. But anyway, I guess the problem is exactly the friend simulator thing, that also doubles as girlfriend simulator. You see, no matter what choice you pick, all girls always fall for you, no fail. So yeah, including male love interests means that they would have to make them by the end of the social links all blushy and shy and wanting to hold your hand and... ARGH, BUT THAT WOULD BE ADORABLE, DAMN ATLUS! But like I was saying, the social link as they are now are very poorly implemented. Hell, in Persona 3, you were actually forced to date all girls and four-timing made the game even harder because you could make one of them pissed if you were spending your weekend with another girl. Well, duh. But yeeeeeah, what can I do? The girls keep coming even if I only agree with whatever they are saying just so I can max the social link with her and finally unlock this beast to use in battle: Wait a minute, that Persona over there was from a guy's social link! But I can't remember any useful Persona that unlocks with a girl's social link............... Why did I even try again? Not that I tried too much in Persona 3... Hey, but it could be a lot lot worse! Remember No One But You? Okay, me neither, I spent a good time looking for the name of this VN. We have a best friend route there, but it's mostly a joke and pity and pornless route because the poor guy didn't get any girl. Oooooh who would even think of going for him from the start! Althought, looking at the CGs in VNDB, the porn seems to suck anyway. Well, the text always sucks, but in this case the CGs sucks too. And we also have Mass Effect Andromeda! We have option for both gender and orientation, but I hope you didn't want to see the boys/aliens going for more than kiss because the male MC and male love interest is the only combination where the super tame porn included in the game doesn't exists, it just fades to black. Then again, the facial expressions of the characters sucks more than No One But You sex scenes, so guess we didn't lose much here either. And for the final example, a date sim/nukige made by Illusion, of all things, that lets you choose your gender and orientation and clearly lets you make an all-boys harem. Oh right, I just forgot to mention that male on male scenes don't exist in the game, fade to black again, het and yuri are fine though. Yeeeeeep, you can play a nukige without any porn. Why even give me the gay option then?????? Fortunately, the game is for PC so kind people quickly modded the damn thing and now it's a 11/10 ge. And now I'll complain that those devs are slowly making their games more gay but it's still not enough gay because I need to title drop somewhere in this post. Let's get out of our confort zone, AAA devs! And yet, some sensitive people complain on how the gay pandering is ruining the industry with our incredible 0.5% of non-indie games that actually gives people a decent and totally optional choice, sure. And it's not like I'm trying to make every game gay, I'm not against that, but I can see it doesn't work well in every single place. Some canon het pairings in single heroine games wouldn't be as perfect if we included more options. It DOES works wonderfully with blank slates MCs like Persona ones, but we need some good guys too. In multiple-times-mentioned Persona 3 I would totally go for a girl anyway, because the girls from my party were mostly good while my best bro Junpei is so bro that he would probably stab me to take my place if I ever let my guard down around him. It would totally be a trap, but not that trap. And I can't risk dying outside the dungeons. I'll finish Persona 5 regardless, eventually. It's a solid 7/10 game for now (DISCLAIMER: in my ratings, 7 is usually okay, it was entertaining but either had hard-to-ignore flaws or it's a bit forgetable). But I have to confirm that the last two dungeons won't save it of being my least favorite Persona game. Shin Megami Tensei 5 when btw? Salt out!

What did you just say about lolis sold to a brothel, Kokoro? I'll have you know I graduated top of my English Literature class at the University of Miami, and have over 50 confirmed credits as a visual novel editor. I am trained in English and I am well known as one of the top editors on Fuwanovel. As we speak I am contacting my network of experts across the internet right now to assemble and work on Musumaker together so you better prepare for the patch, maggot. If only you knew what kind of lolige your "clever" little comment was about to bring onto the world, maybe you would haven't clicked on "Submit Reply". But you couldn't, you didn't, and now the entire VN community will pay the price.

It plucks the threads that make us dance, finger and toe... We surrender, in joy, to the lowest of the foul and rank. We submerge through darkness, rancid filth, hour by hour we move downward, ever closer to hell. In a slow, steady, gait. Now, let the world resonate: Sloth, Gluttony, Greed, Envy, Lust, Wrath, and Pride. A bell of chaos that tolls human desires. After two thousand long years, the one sealed gate to the demonic world will open! DESTRUCTION! CARNAGE! and DESPAIR! Let your instincts drive you! Entrap this world in fear! As the very name MaggieROBOT strikes terror into the hearts of mankind! And I will become the order to rule this wasteland, engulf with pandemonium. The demonic power that was once imprisoned in the depths of Fuwa... will be MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA! __________________________ | | | Just Maggie. | | | | OK | | | ___________________________ Now, let the Maggie worshipping begin, aha~ DISCLAIMER: That was supposed to be a milestone thread, but the AMA thing is getting old. So here's a new edgy twist to the thing~ I don't know what you guys are supposed to do with that, so... Start a new religion maybe, Idk.

Fuwanovel Battle Royale - Volume 2 - Chapter 1: The Beginning <??> Watched the screen in front of <him/her?> intently. Everything was ready. The time had finally come. All that planning, all that preparation. It had all been for this moment. “All the pieces are in place. Well then, let’s start the game, shall we?” <??> Pressed the button before <him/her?> with a wicked smile. “Hear me, members of Fuwanovel. You are here for a single purpose; to entertain me! Those who have their name announced over these broadcasts shall enter the arena, and fight to the death! Anyone and anything you see out in the arenas will be an enemy, so be careful… And ruthless. As far as the rules go… There are none, heh. Good luck.” Day 1: Members in this chapter: “The game has begun. Good luck.” “‘Alright, time to hunt.” Ranzo jumped down from the platform he was standing on, numbered ‘11’. He had woken up inside an unfamiliar room just moments before, where he had found his suit and weapons. After a short, confusing briefing from the person in charge, Ranzo’s <cell?> had opened, and he could walk out. What greeted him was a massive forest, full of large trees towering high above him. The large trees blocked out almost all the sunlight, making it hard for Ranzo to see where he was going. But, it was either straight ahead, or back to the cell, so Ranzo chose to keep walking. The “briefing” had been simple. “You are stuck here. You are to fight anything and anyone you come across. If you are the last alive after the game is over, you win. If you die, you lose.” “Gee, really? If I die, I lose? That’s a shocker.” Ranzo spun his scythe around his body with precision while he walked, clearly used to handling the weapon. A sabre hung from his waist in a makeshift sheathe, crafted from his belt. After having advanced through the forest for a good ten minutes, Ranzo reached a suspicious looking cave, marked with a number— “7”. “Hm, another contender?” Ranzo whispered, and gripped the handle of his scythe firmly while he scanned his surroundings. If his hunch was right, the numbers represented contenders in the “game”. He was 11, and “7” was a different Fuwanovel user, also entered in the game. Crack. Ranzo spun around instinctively at the sound of a branch breaking behind him, and in the same motion, he threw his scythe forwards. The sound of metal colliding with metal made Ranzo flinch for a brief second, and he lost sight of the person who had knocked his scythe out of the air. “Tch.” Ranzo gripped his sabre and chased the mystery person, like a wolf rushing towards a sheep. He had no plan. The only thing going through his head was: kill it. Whoever or whatever it was; kill it. Meanwhile SeniorBlitz ran as fast as he could through the forest, like he had the grim reaper himself on his heels. That was in fact what Senior had thought for a second when he saw the scythe fly towards him just moments before. Senior was not well versed in any kind of combat. He had, in fact, never been in a fight in his entire life. What he did have, however, was a special ability. The ability to know what to do, where to go. He couldn’t explain it well, but there was something guiding him at all times. If he was about to trip and fall, something in his mind would tell him to stop. If he ever got lost, something would guide him back home, even if he had no idea where he was. It was thanks to that power, that guide, that Senior was still alive. He had seen the scythe coming seconds before it was thrown, and had used the sword that was given to him at the start of the game to block its path. He had sadly dropped the sword in his escape, and was therefore now unarmed. “Stop running my friend, I wish you no harm!” His attacker was shouting at Senior from behind. Thanks to his ability, Senior knew that he would be able to shake off his tail if he just kept following the path laid out in his mind. He did not look back, he did not falter. “Tch, you little… How long do you plan on running for?” “I’ll catch you eventually you little slime! Just you wait, I’m coming for you!” The voice of his attacker grew distant, as Senior just kept on running through the forest. Before long, he had completely shaken off the madman running after him. “Haah, haah, haah…” Senior finally had the opportunity to stop for a breath. With his hands on his knees, he spent a few minutes calming down. He knew that the man behind him would not be able to find him for at least another ten minutes, thanks to his ability. “Alright, time to find a better place to hide.” Senior got back up, and started walking through the dense forest, looking for shelter. He figured it would be smart to find someplace safe to gather his thoughts. It would be best to do so before nightfall, so he started walking faster, following the path lit up in his mind. “Just about another hundred meters this way, and— Huh?!” “GRAARGH!” Senior was so focused on following the path to “safety”, he paid no mind to his surroundings, and did not notice the strange creature approaching from his left. Whatever it was, its massive jaw closed around Senior’s chest, and he was lifted up into the air and shook brutally back and forth, the sharp teeth of the beast ripping his flesh apart with each movement. “GYAAAAH!” Senior let out a primal scream, and tried to punch the creature with his free arm, but it was no use. The beast’s iron jaw remained closed, and the life soon drained from Senior’s body, as most of his organs and blood poured down onto the grass below him. His entire torso had been ripped to bits, and what was left of him was soon devoured by the beast, leaving only pools of blood and a few chunks of flesh behind. About an hour later, Ranzo arrived at the scene of Senior’s death. Taking one look at the pool of blood and gore, Ranzo clicked his tongue, and turned back. “Guess someone got to him before me. Oh well, time to look for the next guy, I guess.” Whistling a song to himself, Ranzo spun his scythe around, matching the song’s rhythm as he walked back into the depths of the forest, looking for new prey to hunt. Elsewhere: Arcadeotic sat at the end of a cliff, looking at the waterfall below him with a emotionless expression, balancing a katana on his feet. A single sudden motion would surely send the sword tumbling down the fifty meter long drop. Arcadeotic was wearing a blue yukata, stained red with the blood of a pack of wild boars he had killed an hour ago. After cooking some of their meat on a fire, he had eaten some for himself, then tossed the rest down into the abyss. He had no intentions of sharing the meat with anyone else, nor did he want the smell of the meat to attract possible predators. He had extinguished the fire as soon as he was done cooking the meat, but it might still have notified someone of his location. Nevertheless, Arcadeotic sat completely still on the cliff, staring out into nothingness. Sure enough, after another few minutes, the sound of footsteps could be heard behind him. Still, Arcadeotic remaind motionless, not facing his attacker. Sneaking up behind him was Thatcomicguy, clutching his spear with his right hand. In his free arm was a wooden shield, covered in thick leather. Other than his weapons, Thatcomicguy was completely naked, though his body was covered in blue war paint. Thatcomicguy snuck up to Arcadeotic until he was a mere two meters away, then stabbed at Arcadeotic’s back with his spear. Right before the spear hit Arcadeotic’s back, he jumped straight up into the air, grabbed his katana, and in the same motion as he drew it from its sheath, he cut at Thatcomicguy’s chest. Thatcomicguy barely had time to block the slice with his shield, and was forced back a few steps from the impact. Meanwhile, Arcadeotic landed gracefully on the edge of the cliff, and quickly moved in for another attack, cutting at Thatcomicguy’s left foot. Arcadeotic closed the distance between them in a second, and mercilessly sliced a deep cut in Thatcomicguy’s calf. “Ugh…” Thatcomicguy groaned in pain, and pushed his shield forward defensively, hitting Arcadeotic in the chest. Arcadeotic fell backwards, but quickly regained his balance. For the first time in the fight, Arcadeotic glanced at his opponent, and chuckled. “You look ridiculous.” Thatcomicguy paid him no mind, and tried to focus on his plan of attack. He should have the upper hand, even with the cut on his leg, as he had the longest reach thanks to his spear, and a shield to block the katana’s slashes. The leather on his shield had taken a hit already, and was already starting to come apart. It probably wouldn’t last too long. Seemingly having come up with a plan, Thatcomicguy stepped forward. Although the pain in his leg was nothing to joke about, he did not let it stop him. “Yeah, well, we’ll see who gets the last laugh.” Keeping just enough distance between himself and his opponent, so that the katana would not be able to reach him, Thatcomicguy thrust his spear towards Arcadeotic. Arcadeotic easily deflected the thrust, but as he was about to counterattack, Thatcomicguy swiftly changed his grip, turning his spear downwards towards Arcadeotic leg, and dug the tip of his spear into Arcadeotic’s knee. Arcadeotic winced in response, but didn’t let the pain stop him from fighting. Not wasting any time, Arcadeotic slashed two times, but both attacks were blocked by Thatcomicguy’s pesky shield. “Tch.” It became impossible for Arcadeotic to stand on his wounded leg, which meant he would be at an even bigger disadvantage than before. His strongest point was his speed, but without his full mobility, he would be unable to close the distance between himself and his opponent fast enough to stop the spear from keeping him at bay. “... An eye for an eye, huh?” Arcadeotic said to himself, as he tried to come up with a way out of the dire situation. He had cut his opponent’s leg, but in return, his own knee had been damaged. Both of them were less mobile, but it seemed like his own injury was a bit more serious. “Well, what can you do.” Arcadeotic walked forward with awkward steps, his wounded leg mostly just being dragged along the ground. “I’ll end this with one strike.” The bold statement from Arcadeotic made Thatcomicguy snicker. “Oh, is that so? Well by all means, come at me.” Thatcomicguy spat back, readied his spear, and covered his chest with his shield. There was no way Arcadeotic would be able to attack his opponent’s torso. And yet… “Hmph!” With a grunt, Arcadeotic jumped forward, and with all his might, he slammed the flat side of his sword into the wooden shield. The impact made Thatcomicguy stagger, and he let out a painful groan as he put all his weight on his wounded leg. Still in the air, Arcadeotic slashed downwards. His sword moved along the rough leather covering the wooden shield, until it reached Thatcomicguy’s exposed shoulder. The sharp blade slashed open the naked shoulder, making Thatcomicguy drop his shield. Unfortunately for Arcadeotic, he was unable to brace himself properly after the attack, and he crashed into the ground, dropping his katana. The air was knocked out of him as his chest collided with the rough ground. But, he wasn’t done there. Although the world around him was spinning, he used his healthy leg to kick violently at Thatcomicguy’s wounded foot. “Guaaah!” Thatcomicguy screamed, as he too fell to the ground, paralyzed by pain. Crawling towards his katana, Arcadeotic was ready to deliver the finishing blow. He gripped the hilt of his weapon, and turned towards his fallen enemy. Although every part of his body hurt, Arcadeotic somehow managed to stand, and moved towards his prey with clumsy movements. “Hya!” As he reached his target, he brought his katana above his shoulder, and slashed mercilessly at Thatcomicguy's neck. Clink. The sound of something breaking made Arcadeotic look at his sword in confusion. The katana’s blade had snapped in half, most likely a result from his fall. And since the blade had broken mid swing, he had not actually hit his opponent. “Well, shi—” Before Arcadeotic could finish his sentence, the tip of a spear dug into his throat, making a spray of fresh blood shoot out from the wound, dying Thatcomicguy’s skin in red. As Arcadeotic’s dead body hit the floor, Thatcomicguy dropped his spear, as the strength began to leave his body. “You… Tough bastard…” With those words, he passed out. Meanwhile, at the outskirts of the forest: “How’s this place?” “Hmm, looks good. We’ll camp here for now. Someone start a fire.” “Ugh, do you think there are any more of those things out there? I’m not sure I’m comfortable sleeping here, out in the open…” “Don’t worry, we’ll take shifts keeping guard. #28, #6, you two take the first shift.” “Huh? Who died and made you the boss?” Four figures, covered in mud and blood, were talking under the cover of a giant tree, just half a kilometer from the edge of the forest. The four of them were members of Fuwanovel, and contenders in the death game that had started previously that day. But, neither of them wanted to kill their fellow members, and as a result, they had formed a team. Shortly after they teamed up, however, they were attacked by giant monsters that seemed to live in the depths of the forest. Hungry and tired, the four of them had finally reached a seemingly peaceful area, and were setting up camp with what little resources they had. The four members were Sayaka (#28), Norleas (#9), Shikomizue (#13) and Kiriririri (#6). Shikomizue was the natural leader type, and had taken the lead of the group as a result, something that did not sit well with Sayaka. “Why do I have to listen to your orders, huh? I’m tired too! I want to sleep just as much as the next guy!” “Look, I don’t mean to be rude here, but in terms of actual combat abilities, me and #9 are the strongest. We need our rest, so that we can protect this group when the time comes. You and #6 are… Well you know.” Shikomizue gestured towards Kiriririri, a small girl with silver hair, who was poking the ground with a wooden stick, paying no mind to the conversation that was happening around her. So far, she had not participated in the fighting at all. “Okay, I’ll give you her, but we’re not that crazy! Master and I helped you in the fight against those… Those things, didn’t we?!” Sayaka pointed in the direction they had come from, where the group had fought against numerous strange beasts. Shikomizue scratched his head awkwardly in response. He did not want the group to start fighting among each other, as that would just make things worse. He wanted to figure out what was going on, and how to get out of it. In order to do that, he needed to get as many people as possible to form a team. If no one killed each other, the “game” or whatever it was, had to come to a stop. That was the conclusion he had reached. “Fine, I’ll take the first shift, along with… Her.” Shikomizue looked towards Kiriririri, who had just finished drawing a strange symbol in the grass. “Alright then, let’s get that fire going and—” “Get down, something is coming.” Norleas reached behind his back and fished out the two daggers he was storing in his jacket, then crouched down, signaling for the others to do the same. The group gathered together, and those who had them drew their weapons. “What did you see?” Shikomizue did not have to wait for a response, as a large bear, covered in metal plating, walked past them. It was looking around, like it was searching for the group. It looked… Off. It looked intelligent, just like the other beasts they had fought that day. “Something is definitely not right with these things. They started attacking us right after we formed a team. Almost like… Someone doesn’t want us to team up.” Shikomizue thought to himself, as he recalled the days events. Actually, every time they had been away for combat for a certain period of time, something would come and attack them. Almost like something, or someone, were controlling them. If that was the case, then... “Master, behind you!” Sayaka shouted to himself, and jumped forward. In the next second, a large paw covered in metal slammed down on the very spot Sayaka had been standing. Reaching into his maid uniform, Sayaka fished out a strange statue, in the shape of an anime figure. “They know we’re here master, so we might as well make some noise.” Turning the head of the statue around 180 degrees, Sayaka threw it behind the tree, where the second bear had attacked from. “Everyone, if you don’t want to go boom, I suggest you run!” Moments later, the figure exploded, turning the ground beneath it to ash, blowing the bear to bits in the process. The other bear was alerted to their presence, and jumped at Norleas, who slashed at its snout with his daggers before it had time to react. The beast roared in pain, and slammed its massive paw towards Norleas, who elegantly jumped out of the paws path, and went in for another attack. While the plate armor proved to be an obstacle, Norleas still managed to bring the massive beast down in a matter of seconds, as a flurry of dagger cuts tore into its hide like it was butter, always finding the unprotected parts of the bears body. Meanwhile, Shikomizue was fending of two wolves with his wakizashi katanas, holding back one wolf with each blade, as he pressed them against the wolves sharp fangs. “Where is #6? Someone cover her.” “Yes, yes, Master and I got her, don’t worry.” Throwing explosive statues at everything that moved inside the forest, Sayaka jumped around Kiriririri, who was sitting on the ground, watching the fighting happen around her with an indifferent expression. “Ohh, we’re gonna make master so proud, yes we are, tralala.” Sayaka sang as he looked up at the sky, throwing statues now seemingly at random. A few landed close to Norleas, but he simply moved out of their path with incredible speed each time, still slashing and stabbing any beast that came in his way with his daggers. The group fended off countless beasts, until finally, only one remained. It was a massive tiger, also covered in metal plating like the bears from before. The beast’s eyes were glowing in a strange blue light, and it moved faster than any other creature they had fought so far. Sayaka had tried throwing several statues at it, but it always got out of the blast zone before it was damaged. Norleas was unable to get close to the beast as well, as it was simply too fast. Shikomizue knew they were out of options. “Tch… Is this really how it ends?” He clicked his tongue, and started to walk towards the beast while he shook his head. “Am I really doing this?” After glancing over his shoulder, taking another look at his three teammates, Shikomizue nodded, and closed his eyes. “Listen up. I know what’s going on. These things are being controlled by someone. As long as we’re in a group, we’ll be sitting ducks. They are either being controlled by whoever started this fucked up game... Someone who wants us to keep fighting, or it’s another contender, in which case we should split up to try and find the bastard. So... Guys, split up. Run. For now, just get as far away from each other as possible.” “GRAAWRH!” Like it understood what Shikomizue was saying, the tiger roared, and charged at the group. It was not happy. “Yes come on, you stupid cat.” Shikomizue charged as well, running straight ahead, towards the beast’s fangs. Then… “GUAAH!” Shikomizue screamed in pain, as the tiger bit him, its large fangs digging into his left side. “I’ll keep this thing at bay… You guys… Run away… Now!” Lifting up his free arm, Shikomizue gripped his katana firmly, and slashed at the tiger’s front legs, which were not covered by armor. That should slow it down. The thing was, it would have been impossible to target its legs without making it stop first. And, the only way to do that was to make it stop moving, for instance, by letting it bite one of them. Shikomizue had realized this a while ago, as he watched his comrades fail to hit the beast, and he had given his own life so that the other three could live. “You guys better figure out what the fuck is going on here, and stop this ‘game’, alright?” Shikomizue looked over his shoulder, watching as his allies ran into different directions. No beasts chased them. Pleased that he his plan had worked, Shikomizue fished out a cigarette from pocket, and moved it to his mouth, his hand shaking. He didn’t have anything to light it with, but he still put it in his mouth, and took a deep breath, closing his eyes. That was his last breath. Norleas walked through the forest in silence. His daggers were still dripping with blood from the countless monsters he had killed. Still, he had not even broken a sweat. Killing was his job, after all. It was a breath of fresh air for him to kill beasts instead of people. It was strange. The person whose job was to take people’s lives had chosen to join an alliance to avoid killing others. It was different this time, after all. The people in question were his friends. His fellow Fuwanovel users. There was no way he could kill them. Sensing something moving behind him, Norleas gripped his dagger, and prepared for battle. But… “Oh, it’s just you.” He lowered his weapons. Behind him stood the strange girl from before, Kiriririri. “What, didn’t you hear what the boss said? We’re supposed to split up. What, are you scared in the dark by yourself?” Kiriririri didn't’ say anything. She simply lifted her arm, pointing into the darkness behind Norleas. “What? What is… It…” Norleas turned around to look at what she was pointing at, and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his abdomen. Looking down at his own stomach, he saw a silvery blade sticking out from his chest, covered in fresh blood. “Wh-What…” “Hehe.” The laughter of a little girl was the last thing he heard, as his lifeless body fell to the floor. Kiriririri pulled the sword out of Norleas’ corpse, and it soon turned into light particles, vanishing into thin air. Kiriririri then simply kept walking through the forest with an emotionless expression. Kiriririri: Status = Alive Sayaka: Status = Alive Wildcards This Week? None Dead This Week: Still Alive:

Some of my english visual novels More of my english visual novels English visual novels with NSFW cover Japanese visual novels for PC More japanese visual novels for PC Some more japanese physicals, some of them have NSFW box My japanese visual novels for PS Vita My japanese visual novels for PS3 and PS4 I know Neptunia is not quite defined as a VN, though it does have long VN segments and I just wanted to add it here at the end As you can see I have quite a lot.