jjm152

Yeah I pointed it out to someone that unfortunately when you look at the games that are allowed it does appear that there is a lot of inconsistency. Maybe the solution is to just tag them all with something that denotes that they have some similarities or just throw them in another database rather than get into a shit fight about what's going to be removed or not.

There are so many good Katawa Shojou ones, which I suppose coming from 4chan makes a lot of sense. Poor Lilly being abused again... Completely NSFW Shizune and Misha Also completely NSFW Hanako and Lilly I'll just leave a link here to The Mishimmie

Hmm, only problem I have is that out of those 4 I think I would only call "Deardrops" good and I'm not so sure Riho's ending is a happy one (perspective I guess) The MoeNovel TL of Konosora is um... objectively pretty bad, but I would agree that the tone of it is pretty light hearted. Obviously most moeroge will have happy endings, but as you'd probably agree I wouldn't call most of it worth playing hahah

I'm just going to second some of the other opinions here. Probably two of the best romantic VN's with happy endings that I can think of are G-senjou no Maou and Grisaia no Kajitsu. Even then the happy endings can be real tear jerkers. Be prepared to shed manly tears. Haru's route from GsnM and Sachi's route from GnK stand out as endings that are really happy (particularly Sachi's) but make your face explode with wetness. Edit: I don't consider Steins;Gate to be a romance VN - Do you guys?

In all seriousness, there has been a heightened sensitivity over this in the last couple of months because of two major reasons. Firstly, people falsely associate VN's with Video Games and secondly, there has been a renewed moral panic against video games on the internet spearheaded by a few notable individuals like Anita Sarkeesian. The gist of it is that the medium is evil and misogynistic and they are rallying against any sort of depiction of women that could be construed as "sexist" - which seems to include pretty much anything of a sexual nature (I live in Australia and they had an internet petition that got GTA V pulled from the shelves of 2 major retailers here) It's like everyone is on hyper vigilance alert because they are afraid of either having a petition launched at them, or being flamed on social media or having the press run stories about their services and damage their reputation. It's a weird form of internet slacktivism by the type of people who spend all day on Tumblr bitching about who has the least privilege and talking about how something on Twitter "triggered" them and gave then PTSD. I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty old - almost 40, so I clearly remember when guys like Jack Thompson were going around complaining that rap music and video games caused violence. Now it seems we have people from the other side of the aisle going around saying that video games cause rape culture and sexism. Unfortunately people classify VN's as "video games" in their ignorance, so they are probably an easy target because of their usually adult nature.

Honestly, this is just your taste. There's nothing thematically wrong with either of these issues. Most people like Kyouske and don't want him to be Maou that's the intended dramatic intention of the novel. Is he or isn't he? With the "He isn't" being the reward for people who want to see him with Haru. Also, Haru overcoming her inability to play the violin is also a plot point. The fact that this comes at the denouement instead of earlier is just a simple literary device of book-ending character development. It's introduced early that she cannot do this because of her trauma, which leads to her obsession with revenge, and at the end when she has given up revenge and healed from her trauma, she picks it up and it's inferred she did it because it was the one thing she could do for Kyouske when she couldn't do anything else. It's romantic. I'm not saying it's wrong for you not to appreciate these points, but this has nothing to do with "hype". For many people, they really enjoyed these plot developments (and i consider myself one of them).

Kind of offended at the concept that the only possible reason to include sexual material in a novel would be for pornographic purposes. I mean, it's not like sex has ever been a major part of any plot of any particular piece of important literature.Right?

Nukage sells alot because there is a big commercial incentive. It's cheaper to localize because the dialog isn't as difficult and there isn't as much of it and it's generally cheaper to license as well. That's why most nukage VN's are about 1/2 the price of more story driven eroge - which in turns also causes them to sell more (because they're cheaper, people are more likely to have 20 dollars to spend than 40 obviously). If steam continues to the march towards having more VN's on it, I agree - this will shift over time. Also, it looks like they are starting to make tenative steps towards allowing more adult oriented content on Steam, which overall would be a good thing. Frankly, I think it will take something with the accessibility of Steam to break the hold that piracy has over VN's in the west. Right now it's very niche and most of the people who follow this niche know how to pirate very well. If it was on a distribution platform like Steam, then obviously sales will go up quite a bit. I wouldn't be surprised to see them double or triple the amount of units moved if this became common place.

I think Jewel Knight Crusaders could be classified as nukage. It's actually a fairly funny game as it's set up to be sort of an anime/hentai TV show parody and uses/subverts a lot of tropes typical with that kind of show.

Disagree. I've seen enough anime and read enough VN's to understand the context of the trope. I actually expect it somewhat now.

I know something about this... for various reasons (ahem). In pretty much every country that follows trademark law, you are only prohibited from using trademarks as a trademark. This means you cannot use a trademark to draw a connection between yourself, or a product and the trademark holder. Using a product in a film for instance that happens to be trademarked, like a can of coke, even displaying the coke trademark, is generally considered to not infringe on this. I suspect the reason why fake brands are used or trademarks are hidden on television and film is less about violating trademark and more about not giving away valuable advertising space (product placement). It's worth considering for example that Pepsi products never appeared in any Hollywood films until actress Joan Crawford ended up being on their board of directors after her husbands death. To put it bluntly - Hollywood didn't just discover a taste for Pepsi, but Joan, understanding how the business worked, paid Hollywood to start putting Pepsi brands in their films.

You're sort of thinking about this the wrong way. I've done software dev for over 20 years (most recently as the GM of a software development company) and we don't look at unit sales in terms of profit per unit, instead we think about projects in terms of "return on investment." It varies a huge amount depending on what type of software product we are producing and how it will be used, but for a piece of software that you might considered "stand alone/shrink wrapped" will almost always have recovered it's development costs before any code ever gets shipped due to pre-sales and ordering. This is actually how we decide which projects to take on and how we budget for them. We look to see what we think general interest will be, then we work back from that to sales revenue and then discuss with myself and the technical team the sunk costs to bring it to market. If the stars all align (I see the costs will be significantly lower than we stand to make in revenue) then I give the green light for the project and the marketing and development teams go to work. I'd imagine this is exactly how any of the companies that produce VN's will work as well. Likely they have an expectation of recouping all expenditures and generating profit sometime within a tail of 3 months of release. So with that in mind, unless your project completely stinks (you entirely misjudged the market badly, or it's a bug ridden mess) every unit you move past whatever your break even point is, is essentially pure profit. If you think about it, this is why you'll see older titles being sold on steam sales for like 2 dollars when they originally went for 50. The product itself is virtual, so you can keep discounting it and hopefully keep selling it until it becomes obsolete. I'll scare you guys even more here - My business also does software reselling for various companies. Last year I sold 50 copies of Microsoft XP. Yes, people were still buying XP in 2014.

I agree with this, but also I would say that the marketing channels don't really exist for VN's. Steam is going to be the best bet right now because of the number of people it reaches (putting a VN on a steam sale will spike interest) - but there are issues right now with Steam not allowing Eroge to be listed unless you jump through some hoops (like after market patches). In my honest opinion, the year after Steam finally allows Eroge to be listed on their marketplace the overall volume of VN's sold will double or triple.

Man.... I can't handle practically anything put out by Key. It reminds me of these disgusting figurines my grandmother used to have called, "Precious Moments". Behold the horror: I'm serious about this, I just can't do it. It makes me want to vomit.

Hey mate, I think you are re-inventing the wheel a bit here. Have you looked at doing a pure javascript approach with a technology stack already appropriate for 2D games? I slapped together a pretty good engine for an ero RPG game using Backbone, Underscore and Crafty for 2D/canvas support (has events, sound, user storage, component models, tweening, layering, etc). The component model in particular is nice as it allows for a level of polymorphism and event bubbling in javascript that is very handy for games. Some screens (all assets are just stolen from the web because this is a proof of concept engine): (NSFW)

So here is the contradictory statement that I don't understand - you say " but a piece of fiction is never really excused for embracing racism in any form" right? I don't see racism being embraced. I see some characters saying borderline offensive stuff (not even racist really, as tacky as "yellow fever" is, it's not actually RACIST. As someone who has had racism directed at me before, I can attest to the difference here). In any case, it doesn't appear to be "embracing" anything. Does Silence of the Lambs embrace "cannibalism" because Hannibal Lector is a cannibal? Does "American History X" embrace Nazism because Frank Minke (was) a white supremacist? This is my entire point - characters are just characters. If you wanted to say that HuniePop had a racist message, or a political message on racism or something, then that'd be one thing, but it seems somewhat beyond the pale to claim that because a character is written to be insensitive, that the game itself is "embracing racism". There is a pretty huge difference here, because once you start going down this path of loose correlation you're making it "politically incorrect" to have any character in any game, movie, book, tv show, etc, that has any behavior that is objectionable.

Serious question here, because this kind of response has been bugging me for a while. How do you deal with fiction that has characters in it you don't like? For example, in this game, the characters all have different personalities. Beli is pretty nice and sweet. Audrey is a complete rude jerk who loves calling people "whores". Kyu (the one who's line I believe you are quoting) is pretty insensitive and a bit of a pervert with the innuendo. To me, that's just their characterizations. It might make me think that I like, or dislike a certain character, but I'm curious about what this "line" is and how you can cross it? I certainly hope that you're not suggesting that all characters in a piece of fiction ought to be as inoffensive as possible at all times - that'd be pretty boring after all. Obviously, this also means that you don't have to like characters either. For instance, my wife loves the show Greys Anatomy, but I can't fucking stand it. To me - almost every character on that show is a terrible human being overflowing with narcissism. Literally, I dislike every character on the show that regardless of the plot, I can't watch it. Even then however, I just... don't watch it. I don't think that just because I think they're all terrible human beings that there is some sort of "line" here that they need to respect for me. I dunno, maybe you didn't mean it to come off this way, but I am seeing a lot of people these days on the internet saying similar comments that seem somewhat shallow to me. To the point where I'm actually wondering why it's not OK to have characters that are, well, rather loathsome to some people so long as other people are entertained. After all, it's all fiction anyway isn't it?

Hmm... I'm not sure if it's bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, but I'm also a fan of the tsundere/kuudere tribes. I also have a soft spot for the ditzy huge boobed "big sis" types as well.

I wonder about this too. I guess it's not a big deal, the Kickstarter succeeded and now that I know Denpasoft is going to release the R18+ versions I guess I'll just wait and get those. Sorta sucks a little because I'm betting that the $145 for 4 games is going to be the best deal.

So, this is an actual genre - "Dating Sim". It's not, nor does it pretend to be, a Visual Novel. There are some overlaps between the fan bases, but Dating Sims are absolutely games where VN's are usually not. That being said, I bought this game and I really like it so far - and yes, I have to admit that the most of the reason why is because it's hella cheap (8 dollars on steam right now, 10 dollars for R18 version on manga gamer). My impressions: The art style is really good. The game play isn't too bad. It gets progressively challenging as you close in on a girl. It has anti-cheating built into it so you have to remember the (I think random??) things the girls tell you about themselves. Has some RPG elements which is nice as well. The voice acting is surprisingly good. As other people have noted - some of the dialog is fucking hysterical. Again... the value. The price here is amazingly cheap for the production values. In terms of presentation this game punches above its weight. I haven't tried the Yuri stuff yet - does it change the sex scenes?