novurdim

Except they never "went under", your hot takes are as brilliant as ever.

Ah, right, finished it last week. Surely not a perfect but still quite a read. Well, mostly. I would especially like to point out an absolutely amazing pace so rarely seen in eroge. Dialogue are short, snappy & to-the-point, main story arc almost never drags on for too long, changes of perspective are always very dynamic & narratively apropos, plus the overall structure is anime-like in the best sense. Looks like I'm in the minority but I have definitely enjoyed Himeo's route the most with all the engrossing corporate wars and cute baka tsundere shenanigans. And... Mitoko's the least I'm not against the age-gap romance in the slightest but the topic is handled so... tamely. Considering how relatively rarely this theme is raised in the quality VNs, it's a bit disappointing that the "epilogue chapters" are full of very lackluster drama which found its resolution in a random funny mini-arc. I honestly fail to see how "less effort was put in the other [non-Mitoko] routes" as Freestyle80 has put it above. Mitoko's unique chapters and all the presumably "controversial" story road is basically True, Kaya's personal chapters arrive a bit too early and are mostly filled with rushed and scarcely thought out drama so I can see how you might think that she needed more time and effort to be more properly fleshed out but Asami's and especially Himeo's personal chapters aren't any less developed than Mitoko's in any sense whatsoever. I'm not even sure if those are any shorter than Mitoko's personal part, they certainly didn't feel that way. Needless to say that I also strongly disagree the weird sentiment that some great minds are trying to spread here and elsewhere. Yes, I'm talking about a room elephant called "this a "pedo"-VN, you mustn't read Damekoi unless you are interested in the grown-ass men lusting after the middle-schoolers, other heroines are just for show and have no relevance or substance". Firstly, the structure of the VN is not a usual common=>heroine routes, Kaya and Himeo are cutting short the shared overaching main storyline so yeah, considering that Mitoko and Asami are the last to get a spotlight in the VN, their stories are TECHNICALLY the longest. But heck, I'm not sure how you can even perceive this as a sign that Mitoko is like the super main heroine that overshadows everyone else to the point that you shouldn't read Damekoi if you are not interested in the Mitoko end. If you want to grasp at technicalities, then she's not even technically the last, actually, Himeo has an extra scene after you play through the Mitoko's end. In reality, even among the "shared chapters" every heroine gets her own huge spotlight in the story so it's not like common route is about Mitoko and everyone else is an afterthought with a short epilogue. If you want to cut the game into the conventional routes then I'd say that every heroine's route consists of shared chapters which are clearly centered around her plus her personal chapters with an additional mini-story/epilogue. The same is true for Mitoko too. Yes, she's always important in the story for obvious reasons (the whole main point is about how Osamu tries to be her kind-of-guardian, ya know) and you always get a "heartbroken kid with one-sided love" part in every "route" but she didn't feel like the single important super central main heroine to me at all. Heck, if I had to rate "routes" (including the respective shared chapters), I would say that Himeo>Asami=Kaya>Mitoko. Mitoko's final lovestory is still good enough but I'd even say that if I dropped Damekoi after the Asami's epilogue, I wouldn't feel like I lost any of the impact. So yeah, even if you hate Mitoko and everything her love entails, I believe you can still read Damekoi and have fun with it. Great romcom, adult problems, amusing Osamu employment pondering, Damekoi is a very high quality and well written VN that has enough to entertain most people. Even if for me it's not really a kamige masterpiece contender but simply a good and fun read with its ups and downs. I'd gladly read any other Maruto eroge but I guess their chances to be decently translated don't look very good.

Completely unplanned day-one-buy due to the low price here too. Low-priced quality releases banzai!

A-a-and after looking at the final update, the project can basically be considered abandoned.

RIP, luckily it's not like we have a shortage of eroge these days.

I'm probably a bit late to the party but I've just noticed that Ouka Sabaki, the novel I kept requesting in surveys, is now available on Steam by the courtecy of some new folks called ShiraVN. If Doddler is to be believed, the TL should be more or less fine so it would be great if they gained a bit more support, poor Magistrate seems to be doing pretty bad for the assumed Ace Attorney: The Eroge right now. I also remember seeing that ShiraVN have close ties to DMM Games so Magistrate's success (or, well, not a complete failure) just might open up the possibility for a decent official TL of the stuff like Iwaihime, Ryuusei World Actor or, say, DiGination titles. Though currently it feels more like we are drifting away from those possibilities. Ah, right, there's also a very weird release format and they pushed it out as the Early Access game. Quoting VNDB page Sure doesn't look like a wise decision in hindsight. Even though I bought it, even I'm not going to read it in a "three chapters beta" form yet. Oh well, maybe more people will buy a complete version next year (?), who knows, I still have some hope that this will trigger a new player on the market with an actual access to some of the more demanded VNs.

Even Fruitbat's numbers were too high of a hurdle, it seems.

I had a silly argument about it on this forum a few years back and I still believe this to be the least transparent pseudo-fundraiser imaginable. Maybe not everything I had said that day was sensible but shady-ish is still probably the best word I can come up with to describe it. In a few quotes from back then (when even the second episode was yet to be funded, jan 2017)

50 000 is a very... optimistic base goal, I'd say. I expected them to perform around the Fruitbat's level (i.e. 25-35k) but what do I know, maybe Lemnisca have a good plan of how to incite the masses.

Honestly hard to imagine it being anything but a somewhat too late and too pointless Supipara ch. 3 announcement as the minori's swan song. Anything else would just be too weird and out-of-place, consindering the situation and the fact that they STILL didn't officially cancel that shady fundraiser.

No, I have pretty much said the opposite thing...? Hence why I'm afraid that 2020 will be flooded with those and we won't get many eroge announcements from MG next year. Not that it helped this year, we got only one interesting announcement anyway.

But where's Rance 03? We shall riot! MG actually announced something interesting, will the hell freeze over? It was fairly often requested and a Moonstone title so I'm sure everyone expected them to announce SnM Dreamers sooner or later, but great to see it relatively soon-ish. The rest is the usual rubbish but 1 out of 3 is a crazy good ratio for MG tbh. Also, it's weird how we didn't get a single BL/yuri/otome announcement from MG this year (and despite that we still got like only 1 interesting eroge, haha...), I have a bad feeling about 2020... Oh well, it's one good announcement more than I expected today so let's celebrate!

It's not like JAST are selling their games on other storefronts (exc. steam) so I don't see why MG who basically have the same stance would. Unless the whole payment processors issue becomes unbearably huge.

Damn, it's like you have peeked right into the future.

Mosaics is such an unimportant element to me that it's honestly even hard to say whether I prefer to have them or not.