Tyr

I'm was not necessary implying that you are wrong. Just saying that it's the complete opposite of what Subahibi fanboys were saying about that particular scene until now. I think that are two very biased statements and the truth is probably somewhere between and is certainly a subjective one. However, my admiration for you turning around an established narrative and everyone going with it is sincere. Shows how much power your words have.

For the last 5 years, every time somebody mentions the bestiality scene, there was always someone who told you how important that scene is, totally deep and full with philosophy and stuff. Now it's just ten lines and not important at all. I love these shifts in the narrative as soon as a game is being localized. I hope you get paid for this, you are really good.

If you want an H-Code for a PPSSPP, you have to find one yourself for every game you want to hook. Here is everything you need to know: http://agth.wikia.com/wiki/Cheat_Engine_AGTH_Tutorial Alternatively, you can use HAT. When using HAT, you don't need an H-Code.

Feels to me like a Cyclet/late Black Cyc title with higher budget, though I'm only like 20% in so far. Starts to get a little bit repetitive, but I hope it's intended and will be twisted soon. It's pretty meta at times and I feel the game expects the reader to think in eroge tropes just to revert them later on. I like the writer, I always had the feeling he could do more if he was allowed, but there was always something holding him back. Like for example, that the games he wrote for had to be low budget short fetish nukige lol. The writing of ChronoBox is good, it's also fast-paced which is what I like but that also means there is not much time to develop the huge cast naturally. Every scene in itself is well-written, but the work as a whole seems awfully close to a nukige in how it handles characters and story progression. ChronoBox kinda reminds me of Sukui no Serenade and while I like both games so far (as dark nukige), I think Sukui was better at hiding that it's essentially really just a nice-looking fapge.

I don't understand the hate for ZTD. It has everything good about Uchikoshi and the Zero Escape series; bantering characters, fast-paced storytelling and several mind game scenarios. I mean, it's not like the game doesn't have flaws... like ridiculous lolscience and a convoluted solution ... but that is also what you can expect of Uchikoshi, so I don't know why you are so offended when he simply does his shtick the third time. I highly enjoyed ZTD for what it is. I especially like the non-moe characters and their relationships and the human drama Uchikoshi likes to include in his stories (and sadly, you don't find these in normal Japanese visual novel anymore). ZTD was full of it, so it was an epic win for me, lol. On the other hand, I don't understand the love for Danganronpa either, especially if you like Zero Escape and the Infinity series. Regardless what you think of lolscience and convoluted storylines, at least those games are smart and don't talk down to the reader. Danganronpa however is not smart. The murder cases are all painfully obvious and there is no twist you can't anticipate from a mile away. The games are so pretentiously conceited that they take hours to explain these obvious things to the player, apparently expecting the reader to be dimwit who can't make the simplest deductions by himself, but can't even follow that up with some meaningful conclusions. I have never seen a story revolving around an abstract concept (in this case hope and despair) being so shallow and superficial. Danganronpa is pretentiousness in perfection.

Announcing Marina kinda proves my hypothesis that Mangagamer isn't really interested in bringing NTR eroge to the west. They are only interested in bringing cuckold nukige (meaning consensual adultery aka the most boring subgenre of NTR) since that is a porn genre already established here and normies are familiar with the concept. But NTR games with actual drama, meaningful relationship problems, suspense, angst ... you know, all the good stuff? Eh, probably not.

Teh entitlement is strong with this thread. But yeah, let's shame Peter for releasing the game that will make him the most money, lol.

Could you please not use white as your font color? I use a forum theme with a white background (Rooke's Default Theme) and I can't read your blog without marking all the text or changing my forum theme just for that which is both quite annoying to do every time...

You should do nothing for a few years. Then you can spend the rest of your life regretting that you wasted your youth. That's how we otakus usually spend our free time.

lol that's just the author's own Top 68 RPG list (probably all the RPGs he ever played) with no relation to the game in question which the recommendations should be based on. Why do people even make recommendation lists if they are incapable of providing more insight than just naming their favorite games? ...oh, of course I know why; clickbait and money.

Ah, now I see what you mean. Yes, this is certainly something you won't really find in moe-eroge. I'm not against flirtatious women. But I guess I would like them to not be so obvious with the fact that if you just visit them often enough, you will eventually get in their panties. I would like them to have a line they don't want to cross initially, so it feels more like "conquering" the woman and not just being persistent with your advances.

I don't get this. One of the biggest flaws of AliceSoft is that literally every female character is a slut. While hentai scenes are arguably well-written and quite erotic, the development to get to these scenes is pretty much always superficial and predictable. There is no aspect of grooming in the process of netoriing an AliceSoft heroine, and there is no resistance when she gets NTR'd. I mean, yes, those whores look damn hot when they are doing it but could they at least say "no" in the beginning and try to make it sound a little bit believable? So yeah, there is no tension at all in AliceSoft games and certainly not a tension by denial. If you think I'm wrong, please show me counter-examples.

I'm actually a fan of revenge stories, one reason I like Korean cinema so much, and that is one of my main issues of Berseria; the reason for the vengeance doesn't make any sense. Especially because in the prologue So essentially the reason for the vengeance is that the protagonist doesn't want to accept that somebody actually did exactly the one thing she believes in and fights for. Yeah, what? It doesn't make any sense. And how can you root for a character when the reasoning for her actions is so nonsensical? This is especially infuriating because the story relies so much on principles and ideologies and instead of discussing them they are simply justified by a strong sense of passion you supposedly should have for them since your feelings can't be wrong, can they? But even if you try and not apply logic to it, the vengeance also falls flat on an emotional level. Imagine somebody kills someone close to you and you want to get revenge. Of course, that is vigilante justice, but emotionally I'm on your side despite that. But then you carry out your revenge by killing innocent people ... wait, why are you doing that? It doesn't make any sense and I'm not emotionally attached to your cause anymore. And that is exactly what Berseria's revenge story consists of and why it doesn't work. There is a trope in Japanese entertainment which got more popular in recent years: sacrificing humanity in order to save those close to you. It's mainly an edgy reaction to Japanese culture which deems the worth of the group higher than the worth of an individual. The trope isn't inherently bad and it can be used to tell great emotional stories. But recently, like with many initially good tropes, the stories surrounding this concept get dumber and dumber. The trope only works if the reader can emphasize with the characters and at least emotionally understand the reasoning for their actions, but nowadays it's used more in a.reactionary manner; the many are sacrificed not because there is an emotional reason, but mainly because the system isn't liked (for no other reason than being contrarian on principle) and the reader just wants to see the world burn. I'm sorry, I already wrote too much. But after spending 150 hours with Berseria and really liking Tales of Zestiria and how it seriously discussed important themes and philosophies (I think Baba's vision was realized in this one the most), I'm really disappointed by how shallow Berseria is, how it's a disgrace for the vengeance-genre and how it looks down on its player by not even trying to make any sense at all, not even on an emotional level. That is, if you are not an edgy teenager who wants to see how badass characters (they are pretty emo) go against a supposedly evil system (it's not evil). I do not mean that as an insult*, we all were at least a little bit emo at some point in our life. But just because we were kinda stupid in this phase of our life doesn't mean that the entertainment that caters to this phase should be as stupid as we were. In fact, it should be intelligent, educate us and show us more than we wanted to see. That is what young adult fiction should be about and that was Baba's vision. And Tales of Berseria betrayed it. Hard. *highlighted because I'm sure this rant appears very pretentious, but it's not meant to be that and instead really more a cry of a JRPG nerd who takes his hobby way too serious and wants to discuss it on the Internet

I assumed you would like it. Most people do. But just because you like something doesn't mean it's actually good. And your initial question was whether it's good or not. It's ironic that Vesperia and now Berseria are considered the "best" Tales of games when they are conceptually pretty "anti-Tales of". They go against Baba's vision who wanted to tell meaningful stories discussing important topics and philosophies and instead consist of shallow and morally disgusting power fantasies which is probably exactly what edgy teenager or chuunibyous want to indulge in, and that is why these games are so popular. But are they actually good? Do gameplay and story advance this long-standing franchise adequately while being true to the series' traditions? For Berseria, the answer must clearly be no. And that is probably also the reason why you or many other people will have a blast playing the game.

Tales of Berseria is the worst Tales of game so far. It betrays the values of this long running series in order to cater to a young and shallow new generation of players by telling a nonsensical story with superficial themes and edgy characters. No wonder Baba resigned as the producer of the series.

You're asking in which situations substitutions can be used? I often use them for formatting the output text. For example, I always substitute names into romanji (even when you don't use MTs and only use parsers, the output simply looks better compared to not recognized kanjis messing the parsing up), I use regular expressions for detecting names written in kana so they don't mess up normal Japanese words who consist of the same kana sequence. When playing games with hookable interfaces like RPGs, I use substitutions to format the interface in a way that is easy to read, like adding line breaks when the game lists attributes or skill descriptions. And when the h-code gives me some garbage characters or repeated lines or names, I use substitutions to delete them. In short, every time I'm not satisfied with the output of the h-code I use, instead of having to search for a new h-code, I just tweak the output of the old one with substitutions and regular expressions.

But I did!

Not sure why your ITH3 is not working with the fix but since you said you are using ITHVNR with TA, you can just use the substitution filter I mentioned.

Your problem could have been easily fixed by using TA's substitution filter (Tools --> Substitutions). Substitute a line break (\n) with "nothing" and everything will be fine. http://sanahtlig.blogspot.com/2015/08/windows-10-vn-compatibility-list.html

Stop spreading misinformation @ahan94. Mireado is not the "second admin" of sakuradite. He is just a very active member of the VNR community and the one who updates his own custom build of ITHVNR which is essentially the successor to the original tool since the original ITHVNR only used VNR's latest hooking engine and Mireado, now that VNR isn't updated anymore, implements his own hacks and hooks. But he is certainly not in any position to maintain the actual VNR application or the sakuradite website. In the blogtext you linked he only said that he tried to contact jichi-sama but he didn't get any response. Like everyone else who tried that. I'm astonished how out of touch with reality the VNR community apparently is, who refuses to accept the harsh truth which is really not that hard to figure out. Let's look at the facts again, shall we? jichi-sama is a highly motivated and talented individual, was updating VNR nearly every day and was also always online on sakuradite to chat with his community one year ago, he suddenly stops updating VNR, nobody has seen him ever since You can deny reality as much as you want, but don't tell people who are genuinely interested in VNR's fate to wait and raise their hopes... when there is no hope left and this chapter in the history of text hooking is already over. Just move on.

I don't know why this should be a terrible decision. Zestriria is meant to be played before Berseria so it's obviously the right thing to do.

Like I said before, there is no need to buy orbs with the limited red tickets. You can already farm even the seemingly rare eagle orbs in the beginning of the game if you visit the forest area. You can find enough adventure points in the first two sections of the forest to unlock it as a bonus. You should be able to survive the second section when the need for eagle orbs is setting in. Before, you should be able to pay for every eagle orb event with the orbs you can find in treasure chests.

I think one of the reasons why this game is so good and connects with the people who like to read a well-written story is that Natsu no Kusari is not trying to sugarcoat anything. Shinji is a bastard. The game never glorifies what he does and even in the instances when he succeeds, there is a bitter aftertaste for the reader to stomach. That may not seem like much, but it's really fundamentally different than 99% of all the other eroge out there which are constantly trying to pander to the reader. For example, usually if you have a villainous protagonist, there is some kind of dark desire the reader has and the game wants to satisfy. (And there is nothing wrong with this as this is fiction and having some dark fetishes is perfectly normal.) In a normal corruption eroge, even though the reader knows it's wrong to do the things shown in the story, the corruption of the heroine is in the end shown as something glorious, a feat worth praise. And the evil protagonist, although without a doubt the reader knows he is a bad person, is looked upon with envy and respect. And the reader might even wish he was as awesome as he is. But none of this is in Natsu no Kusari. Even though the game knows that the majority of its players will identify with the protagonist, it doesn't give us the satisfaction of enjoying the torment of the girl or putting ourselves in Shinji's shoes. We only get a reason, no justification for having these feelings, the feelings of being social outcasts, not being able to find our place in society or even happiness, even though the game definitely understands why we are thinking like that and why we can relate to Shinji's line of thought. When I'm thinking of the best game 2016, there is no doubt in my mind that it's Natsu no Kusari. For telling a story without compromises alone, even though the reader might, no, certainly will find this off-putting, it deserves this title. There is no reason to force you to read something that you will obviously not enjoy. Natsu no Kusari is a very good game, but even the best story can't make you enjoy something that is conceptually repulsive to you.

I wanted to wait until the year is over before I write my list for this year, but of course I haven't had the time to actually look at the December releases and now the year is over. Luckily, there isn't much interesting for me anyway. Before we start, just let me mention some noteworthy December titles: Venus Blood Ragnarok could be a nice game, but I don't really like the Venus Blood series, and as some kind of sequel it probably won't win me over anyway. I have played the trial of Meguru Sekai de Towanaru Chikai wo and it really didn't impress me. Looked like an even cheaper version of Izumo 4. And Izumo 4 was already a letdown last year. The RPG mechanics of Izumo 4 are very simple and Meguru Sekai de seems even simpler. But that is not all, contrary to Izumo 4, this time the game also looks pretty ugly! It that the reason why Yamamoto Kazue changed her name to Yamamoto ☆ Kazue for this? Well, I probably will play it nonetheless because I don't like to judge something I haven't really played, but eh, not in the near future. That's it for December. The rest doesn't interest me or I already know it will be bad (You can't fool me Moonstone!). Did I just say I don't judge something I haven't played? Eh, whatever... But now some honorable mentions of games that actually looked interesting but I haven't had the time to read them, so they won't be in my 2016 list: Dungeons & Daimeiwaku: I've read the trial, but haven't found the time to read the actual game. I'm sure it's good but it's kind of demotivating for me to read an RPG without any gameplay, heh. Iwaihime: Ryukishi07 and horror should be exactly what I'm looking for but for some reason I have this untouched on my hdd for a year now. Maybe I miss the Ryukishi07-art, since it doesn't look as good with generic moeblobs. Trianthology: Now I have the art, but not a full Ryukishi07 game, haha. Still, I have to read this sometime soon. Kanojo ＊ Step: This could probably be the "Best Charage" of 2016 as far as I have seen it. The humor is great, something that's really missing in pretty much every other modern charage. It's a shame that the genre charage has such a low priority for me, so I haven't really read much of this VN so far. Now I mention some games people might expect in my list of 2016's best eroge, but I actually found them to be only mediocre: Shi ni Iku Kimi, Yakata ni Mebuku Zouo: Yeah, I wasn't as excited about this as everyone else. I do not fetishize gore. I like death as an element of a thrilling story, but death in Nikuniku has no impact. There is no meaning in killing someone when they can't die. Baka Dakedo Chinchin Shaburu no Dake wa Jouzu na Chii-chan: This game has a Genre-Shift tag of 3.0 on vndb and some people claim it would be different than what you expect it to be. Spoiler: It's exactly what it looks like! WTF are the people talking about? lol Maitetsu: Borefest and not even usable as a lolige. Really only interesting for train otakus. Now let's start with the list of maybe not necessarily the best but the most impressive eroge of 2016, for me at least: Eroge of the Year: Natsu no Kusari Best game without a doubt, there is no other contender here. If I would make a Top 5 of 2017, the second place would already be many, many levels under this one. It's so good (or all the other recent games are just so bad, lol). I have already written walls of text in other threads about this game so I won't repeat myself here. I will just say that this game is exactly what I'm looking for when I read an eroge, the reason why I even started with this medium. Great characterization and the perfect use of narration, music, visuals and voices makes this one of the most compelling short stories I have read in years. Best NTR Eroge: Dearest Blue The lack of elf is really showing and I certainly can't say that any LiLiM game is really good, but at least with Dearest Blue LiLiM improved on their formula and made it its best game so far. We still have some obvious "Do you want to get NTR'd"-choices, but they are not as in-your-face as in previous titles. Some choices make you wonder what will actually happen if you go this route and that at least is an improvement. In some instances there is some believable drama and especially one route is good where you can cheer for both, the protagonist and the rival because both characters are likable. The main heroine is also well-characterized, being an independent and strong woman without going too bitchy or slutty. Still, not everything is good. Pretty much every male character except the aforementioned one is a one-dimensional evil villain. The biggest problem however is that the story is build around some kind of NTR/death-game where all the players need to outwit each other ... but in the end there are no mind games or twists happening! Heck, even I could probably win this game because every other character is so bad at this, not having a plan or making retarded moves. What a disappointment! Read this for the relationship drama, not for the death game. Best Modern Oldschool Eroge: Ryuudouji Shimon no Inbou This might be an unpopular opinion, but I really think that the writing in many of the latest Mink-games is topnotch. Really, if Mink-games weren't conceptually so limited (being only nukige), they could be really great. Why is that? Is it because Mink is such an old company that they still carry on old writing traditions which were established in the Golden Age of eroge? That at least would explain why Ryuudouji Shimon no Inbou is so good when it conceptually shouldn't be! Don't misunderstand me, Ryuudouji Shimon no Inbou is not a good slave-training eroge. There is no real SLG gameplay here, instead the only choice the player has is to visit 1 of 20 locations every day hoping that some kind of event happens there. There is no indication which area you have to visit, neither in script nor in the interface, it's completely by chance. Save-scumming and blindly gathering events at its finest, huh. But if you can look behind this (preferably with a walkthrough), you will find a game that feels like the late 90s. Mainly because this is a blatant clone of 99's Yakin Byoutou. It's pretty much "Night Shift School Girls". Aside from the setting that is now a school, we have the same kind of characters, the same storyline and the same development Yakin Byoutou had. And it's great, because that formula still works 17 years later! The ugly main character, who has just enough understanding of the human psyche to get what he wants, the pure maidens who fall into his traps, not because they are sluts but because they are believable corrupted, and the evil female mastermind who is probably even worse than the main character. It's beautiful. The nostalgia is strong with this one. Best Dark and Edgy Eroge: Tokage no Shippo Kiri I'm cheating here a bit because the game was released in November 2015. But since the fandisc was released in January last year which means the full experience was only available to us in 2016, I see it as 2016 game. There is not much to say here, what Derg not already said. Games like this prove that even low-budget publisher can make good games, if they just try. CYCLET is not Black Cyc, but it tries nonetheless to be something special and succeeds in setting itself apart from all the other low budget publisher. Maybe that is the reason we only had one CYCLET game in 2016; they emphasize on quality, not quantity. Best RPG: Dungeon of Regalias Let's not talk about the story and the characters. They are terrible, like in every Astronauts Sirius game. But damn is the gameplay addicting and actually good. Like in, really, really good. This is probably one of the best ero-dungeon crawler existing. They did everything right with this one. Hard difficulty available from start. Skills as "items" which can be equipped so you can change your build without any resetting of skill points like in other games. Monsters who all act differently thus forcing you to change your strategy and character builds and party constantly. Great game. Best SRPG: Sankai Ou no Yubiwa I'm probably the only one, but ... I actually liked 2016's Eushully game. Yeah, really. Ok, it wasn't really a good SRPG; it actually had many flaws, like being far too easy and exploitable and the routes being too similar to each other... but... I liked the concept. Having six main characters who all represent a different kind of approach to the Ero-RPG genre is really something I wish more games would do. I hate the good guy, the antihero and the maou archetype, and sadly most Eushully games have one of these three as their main character. But Sankai Ou has also three other, more interesting protagonists to choose from. For example, I always wanted the angels to win in an Eushully game, and finally I have the opportunity to do this because the obligatory fallen-angel storyline is already covered in the other routes. Nice. Biggest disappointment: Extravaganza ~Mushigurui Hen~ I was so hyped for this one. The first true Black Cyc game after 5 years of absence. Written by Banya Izumi who we could trust with the task of continuing a beloved series, right? Right? No, it's awful. This game turned out to be an abomination which is quite remarkable because Black Cyc already milked the Extravaganza series with bad sidestories back when Black Cyc was still good for the most part. And Mushigurui Hen is even worse than these cheap nukige spinoffs. At least with cheap nukige fandisc, we know we get something bad. Mushigurui Hen on the other hand could have been good. It could have been awesome. But it wasn't. So what went wrong? You have these great characters with their epic background stories, but what do they do with them? Putting them in school, because school life is, as we all now, the most important thing ever. And if a character is too old for school, just make them into rich snobs whose only problem in life is being too old (meaning being 23 years old) and lamenting about not having the time to go to the cinema with friends because work (meaning being CEO and chilling all the day in the office). And if that wasn't bad enough, they also retcon a character death because this character was very popular back then and we need him for funny slice of life scenes now, yay. The most offending thing however is how this "sequel" actually takes place after the second arc of the original Extravaganza, which means before the last third of the original game. And all the important character events in the third arc which really were the heart of the Extravaganza story apparently don't take place in this timeline. Instead, we get inferior and meaningless drama with derailed characters in Mushigurui Hen which is apparently now the canon timeline. Hurray. Biggest insult: Everything released by Akabei Soft 3 I'm not going into this now, but literally every AKB3 game this year greatly offended me, just as Silky's Plus' games did last year. Let's just say that AKB3 makes games which represent everything that's wrong with modern eroge and have nothing left of what made eroge once great. (I might write a post explaining this statement in the near future.) It saddens me how popular these games are. A dark prospect for 2017.