Kaguya

This month was a bit of a rushed test run, but we'll have more and nicer stuff next time w

I wrote that, btw
You're welcome

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It is pretty funny... and I think it is right up your alley.  However, I'd honestly recommend Hypno or Frontier over this one... I may have rated Frontier lower, but that was before I became *smiles wryly* accustomed to the tentacle thing.  For that matter, Empire was better.  For some reason, the goddess-corruption games always seem to have better characters and a better story.  This one was amusing, but the story as a whole I'll probably forget inside a few months. 
Currently, I'm about 70% sure this is a prequel to Hypno, based on certain things I came across in the Law route (the existence of Tactica technology in Brave's world, if in a cruder form, the Tou no Kuni heroines' ending, etc).

It was funny, but I wasn't too fond of Noire's strategy game either, yeah.

Depends on how you handle it, I guess. I was a guild leader in some games, and it's a really neat and fun experience to see your little circle growing up, getting more people, helping newcomers and seeing you and your main guildies being able to complete endgame raids quicker and more efficiently over time.
As someone who generally plays priests, it's nice to chat with someone for hours on end and when we're raiding seeing your reliable mates doing god's work in DPS, or seeing how much better the new tank can hold aggro with the new gear we had to raid for three days to get.
I never really got hardcore, but those were some really fun times. Though I basically roleplay a doormat when I'm playing these types of games, since I find it's the best way to hold a group friendly and nice.
It really is about the social aspects, and playing can be a blast. If you're just queuing with random people you don't know and each of you is doing your thing without contact, I can see it being pretty boring, though. 

And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between a preference and a definition. 
But what exactly is this essential "identify of a visual novel" that I'm ignoring? Where can I find it?
Are we saying VNs must use anime-inspired spritework? Would that mean this or this don't qualify? Or are we saying VNs can only contain "things otaku like"? Which would be a very curious definition indeed.
I don't doubt it for a second. 

The majority of the VN-players, I'd say. 
The term is there to identify a series of games. It just looks like you're trying to add more stuff to it for the sole sake of technical precision by ignoring some aspects of what makes the identity of a visual novel, which becomes moot when you start including stuff that wasn't intended to be part of the term in the first place. 
If I take a lasgna and spread the layers of it into a circle is that a pizza? Maybe you could call it one, maybe not. But you're probably much better off just calling it a lasagna. It's probably better to find a new term for the other stuff that you're including into visual novel than it is to make the first term that broad. 
But again, what do I know. I'm generally pretty silly, after all

To be honest, I feel like "Visual Novel" was coined to encompass the typical eroge-style originated in Japan due to the lack of a better term.
I'd argue that the majority of visual novel fans come from the anime medium, and that they are visual novel fans because of that anime-ish eroge style, and that the actual presentation of the text as, well, a novel that utilizes visual elements and everything else you elaborated on the post isn't actually that relevant. 
Because of that, while the definition is coherent, I don't see any advantages of using it since it needlessly broadens the term to include a lot of things it wasn't meant to include in the first place. 
Though I could also just be an idiot. Who knows.
Just my two cents on it.

If I don't win, this is rigged. 

Pfff. Them honey pots are nothing compared to Rance's imperial juice. 

That easter.