mjriedstra

I don't think you need to tone the freckles down if you like them. You added them for a reason, and they certainly do lend the character an element you don't often see in VNs. There are real people with freckles just like that. There's one in the office just down the hall from mine, in fact.

Did anyone else feel like every route except Umi's was reverse NTR?

It's insanely moe. But not only that, the gameplay aspect is really good. I've only played a handful of VNs that were story-focused yet still had an enjoyable and replayable minigame, and Symphonic Rain is one of them.

Sorry to hear about your computer troubles. Fear of losing progress is one of the reasons I have backup copies of my current project at various stages of completion spread across multiple hard drives. It's good that you didn't get discouraged. Keep at it! Side note, I can hardly remember a major character in a VN with such pronounced freckles. It's pretty interesting, aesthetically.

Really nice BG art. The more I follow this project, the more I'm looking forward to it. Keep at it! Your writer has a steep hill to climb to ensure that the text lives up to the quality of the assets. I notice that nobody on your team is tagged as an editor or quality checker. Both of those positions will be key to the finished quality of your game, so hopefully you have someone lined up to fill those roles.

Little Busters is not Clannad or Rewrite, but it isn't bad by any means. I can't really think of any reason to not at least try it, unless you are somehow so pressed for time that you're passing up complete masterpieces to do so. It has solid production values, some fun characters, and spends 80% of its time on relaxing slice of life. If that's your thing, go for it.

I've already read all of these so I won't vote and skew the results, but I just want to say that even though G-senjou is one of my favorite VNs of all time, when it comes to stories centered around music ... you can't find something better than Symphonic Rain. If you haven't played it, play it. Regardless of whether it wins or not.

I think the bones of this issue lie in your personal definition of "escapism." Healthy escapism, in my opinion, is when you dive into fantasy to get away from troubling aspects of your life that you cannot control or change. It's perfectly reasonable to distract yourself from those issues by doing something that helps you forget. Unhealthy escapism is when you are hiding from something that you really must deal with. Generally speaking, the longer you avoid handling these types of issues, the worse they get, so not only are you postponing the inevitable, it's likely that you are making your own future more difficult for the illusion of a simpler present. If I was doing something that I loved, but it was making my situation worse, that would be a strong implication that the problem I was avoiding was that second kind of problem. Therefore, I shouldn't be avoiding it. Of course, knowing what you should do and being able to force yourself to do it are two different things. But if there's something you're running from and you know that running will hurt you, try to stop running.

http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2014/2014-world-population-data-sheet/data-sheet.aspx Have a look at the chart describing the average number of births per woman and how much it has declined in every region of the world since 1970. It takes a ratio of about 2.1 to maintain a steady population. Notice that the two most developed regions in the world, North America and Europe, are both far below that and would have shrinking populations if not for immigration. Asia and Latin America will be dipping below that rate very soon based on the long term trend. Only Africa is still "healthily above" that hold-steady number, and Africa is the place that can least afford to have tons of babies right now. The chart is completely upside down. The areas of the world that could most afford to support more babies are having by far the fewest. There is an almost perfectly inverse relationship between how rich a region is and how many babies it is having.

The population of nearly every developed country is shrinking if you factor out immigration. Once the third world countries reach a similarly advanced level, it's almost inevitable that the global population will stabilize and then begin to decline, even as the availability of resources vastly increases through technological innovation. When that happens, we'll be popping out designer babies just to keep the species going. You might think that's a joke, but if you look at the aging crisis in Japan and compare it to other advanced countries like Canada that are only a decade or two from being in the same boat, it's not as funny. Populations are growing in places that can't support more people and shrinking in places that could support many more people. I'm getting way off topic now, but this was an interesting thread regardless.

Each of us will experience the sadness of losing loved ones many times in our lives. Choosing death when it happens is not rational, since if even a moderate portion of us did that each time we grieved, soon there would be no one left. Wanting your loved one to carry on after you have passed away is not possessiveness; it's logical and necessary at both the individual and societal levels, in order for us as a species to carry on.

They didn't release it. He has the un-released version Wairu was working on.

I'm not sure what I would personally do in a Clannad sort of situation. I think it's one of those deals where it's hard to know for sure what you would do unless truly confronted with the situation. With that said, I've always been fascinated by the question of how to value an uncertain length of remaining life. In the future I plan to make it a topic for one of my creative works. I think that would be a bad way to repay that person for the kindnesses they did you. If they really loved you, they would want you to live and to carry on their memory. To think of it from the other side, if you were the one who was going to die early, would you want her to kill herself along with you? If the answer is "yes," it's probably not love. It's possessiveness.

I personally thought Little Busters was enjoyable. By KEY standards it's certainly not the best, and I found the gameplay element pretty pointless, but overall I don't regret playing it by any means. As with all KEY games, most of the characters are very likable. The game sacrificed a lot of its dramatic potential for the sake of achieving a certain type of ending, but that doesn't invalidate the individual routes or it being a fun slice-of-life with good production values. If you like KEY's style of storytelling, it's worth playing.

No matter how many times I look at this list, I'm still surprised by it. Rin and Lee being in the top 5, when no original heroines made it into the top 5 ... I don't know what to say about that. I'll hope for the best and optimistically perceive this to mean that the A-series games I haven't read yet are way more amazing than I was giving them credit for. That being the case, I hope the translations go well. I want to read these things and see for myself.

Meditation in all its forms is a way of attaining a certain beneficial state of mind, be it relaxation, emptiness, focus, a feeling of becoming one with the world, or whatever else. The main character in my first novel has a self-developed form of quick-acting meditation that he uses to rein himself in when things are going off the rails (or when things are going too well and he can't cope). His mantra is "Breathe in peace, breathe out everything." The idea behind it was that by focusing on negative attributes that you want to rid yourself of and intentionally expelling those attributes along with your breaths, you center and master yourself. I think of most meditation as being a formalized version of what people naturally do every day when they, for example, take a deep breath before tackling a daunting task. Scheduling meditation into your routine could improve your ability to call upon that state of mind — whatever state you choose to aim for — when you really need it.

I feel like they didn't have a good handle on what kind of story her character could have that doesn't overlap too much with other characters. Chris's original route already played up the over-protective Dad / General angle and the Kuki maids have the military-fish-out-of-water-in-civilian-life / combat experience / PTSD struggles thing going on. If she ever gets a retconned redo of a story, it would be interesting to see what angle it takes. I'm having a hard time imagining it myself.

Oh, nice. Awesome, actually. The level of detail and lighting effects are amazing. If there's something "bad" it would be that the "side character" is now my favorite one.

I like the Muv-Luv series, but I can't even imagine what they could legitimately do with all the extra money that they aren't going to need to get the work done. By the time this is over they'll be able to create about 3 new games with the extra cash if they wanted to. I can dream, I guess.

I have to see this poll where Margit is #1. I feel like some super hardcore fan must have gamed the voting somehow. She's a good side character, but after the "story" she had in S, I have a hard time imagining a universe where she is more interesting and likable than Mayucchi and Wanko.

I have to scratch my head that some people think Clannad and Kanon weren't good anime. Opinions are subjective of course, but ... that's still pretty hard to buy into. Clannad especially is excellent. Even if you don't personally like the genre, the characters, storytelling and production should be acknowledged as exceptional. With that said, Rewrite's story is nothing like Clannad and wouldn't lend itself to the same type of adaptation. I'm actually having a hard time imagining how to make the VN into a good anime without completely changing the story and flow. Hopefully they'll acknowledge that different mediums need different approaches and make whatever adjustments are necessary instead of trying too hard to be faithful to the source.

Code Geass season 1 and 2 are, in my opinion, the best action / psychological / battle of wits anime ever made. There's gore and the character designs / camera work are a little ecchi at times but nothing more objectionable than Attack on Titan by any stretch. Check it out.

This question has no answer, since it's not necessary to "show" anything at all to tell a story. But then you don't have a visual novel, you have a novel. Unless you're making the argument that even novels with descriptions of sex are automatically porn just for acknowledging that sex exists. To illustrate in a different way how extreme that opinion would be, think about how much of the average person's daily life involves sex. The human race historically couldn't have existed without it. That makes it pretty important. Now think about how much of our lives we spend consuming food or readying food for consumption. Many visual novels portray scenes based around eating or cooking because those are natural and integral parts of every day life. Is every visual novel food scene just "food porn" and unnecessary to storytelling? For some reason many of us classify sex as something extraneous, unnecessary and distasteful that should be kept behind closed doors, even though there are only a few other things in our lives that are as important and natural. I find that distinction arbitrary.

Wanko to Kurasou is the one that comes to mind where sex is a necessity in a way that doesn't seem purely exploitative. There's a very serious story and it's far from a nukige, but it's full of sex because all of the characters need it for one reason or another that makes sense in the context.