Tyr

No, these scenes didn't hurt the pacing at all. They were essential scenes in the pivotal part of the original VN and just because Japanese readers are ADHD-victims who are too stupid to appreciate a character-driven storyline, they were cut in the Xtend version in favor of the not so interesting storyline (which was never the focus in the first place) and were instead labeled as some kind of side-story bonus scenes thus losing all their emotional momentum. Thanks to that you EOPs can now read the butchered Xtend version which is neither fish nor fowl. But please stop justifying this mess by blaming the original version for having bad pacing. Because that is just not true. I know that since I read the original VN and Route D was one of the best character-driven drama I've ever read in a visual novel; mainly thanks to the scenes which were omitted in the Xtend cut.

All these questions will be answered in future routes. First question in the third route, second question in the last route, if I recall correctly.

JapanesePod101 is nice, but very confusing if you are new. For example, it's best to begin with Beginner Season 2, not 1, and nothing on the site itself hints at that. You have to research for yourself what's the best order to listen to the content and that's something they really messed up. Not every series is good either. But they do have some really nice podcasts. For example the series about onomatopoeia is very good. Partly because the hosts are great, but also because it's a topic most textbooks and other Japanese learning sources don't cover. Tae Kim's guide has the best introduction to the Japanese language I know. Everyone should at least read the first chapters. If we're talking about advanced grammar though, I believe Imabi is really the best grammar guide available. And with "best" I mean most comprehensive. However, it's far too detailed and hard to understand for beginners. So yeah, start with Tae Kim. If you are not a native English speaker, I recommend searching for a version of that book in your language. Chances are, it might be much better than the original. That's what happened when I bought the book in my language. Some translators chose much better keywords than Heisig himself.

Playing Kara no Shoujo 1 without having played Cartagra is like playing Kara no Shoujo 2 without having played Kara no Shoujo 1. And nobody would try to do the latter, would he? People should start calling Cartagra "Kara no Shoujo 0", so nobody assumes anymore that just because the games are named differently, they could be played independently. There is also a vndb discussion about this topic: https://vndb.org/t7131 tl;dr: The answer is: no, you should not play KnS without having played Cartagra.

I wouldn't call it a nukige because you simply don't see any h-scenes except when you trigger an ending.

Why the hate only for the Sakura games. They are still by far the best games in this bundle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Every game with Nick Doerr in its credits is essentially a rewrite.

I don't think that statement is fair. Even though Mangagamer does everything to look like a porn company only selling nukige, they actually aren't. Back then, when MG was still uncool and visual novels weren't popular yet, they released an all-ages visual novel, Higurashi, even though it was pretty clear that it wouldn't be very profitable. Of course, they got hate because there were licensing issues with the soundtrack and because they didn't use the Alchemist sprites. But still, without MG, we probably wouldn't have gotten an English Higurashi release at all. Since then there was always an "All-ages" in the MG store. Also, even though they were advertising every game as a sex romp, people who actually played their games know that most of the time this was false advertising. I remember playing Edelweiß expecting a nukige because the summary very much implied it, but then I got one of the funniest love comedies I ever played. You only need to think of the gay ghosts to notice that they are still doing this, but nonetheless the games are actually not as porny as MG tries to make us believe. I don't think you can criticize MG for focusing on nukige. If you ignore all nukige in their portfolio, you still have a great list of mostly interesting games. And I think this list is possible, because they release also a few nukige (most of them actually quite good if you compare them to JAST's nukige for example) to make cash, because we all know that it's the porn that sells.

The comments here are fascinating. For me, there is no other color more harmonious and pleasant to look at than blue. I'm also a fan of mono-color designs, so I like it if there is only one color in different shades and I can't stand it if there is a second color just for the sake of having a second. Funny enough, I absolutely hate orange and I find it intriguing that most of the time when people try to make improvements to a design they suggest to add orange to the color scheme. No, irony. I really find your posts very interesting. What I give you is that the shades of blue aren't really that compatible with each other. VNDB's Angelic Serenade, which I mentioned before, looks far better than this. I guess it has to do with JAST Discuss being a more modern design which tries to be "interesting" rather than "easy to look at". I registered at the forums and the first thing I noticed are many dead links in the profile menu. Also, I didn't get an E-Mail even though the forum keeps notifying me that I should confirm my address. Also, it seems there are some JAST Connect topics missing, or am I overlooking something? Edit: Got the E-Mail just after writing this comment, one hour after registering. Hah.

People who think the color theme of the new JAST forums looks ugly are probably the same kind of people who don't think that Angelic Serenade is the best color theme ever made ... even though it is.

This was the gayest ESC I have ever seen. Also the worst song-wise. The winner song was a political statement and won because of that, nothing more. The song itself is pretty bland and certainly not one of the best on this evening. (Political songs aren't allowed, so they said it's not political, it's personal! Yeah, of course it is, lol.) Best song was obviously Love Love Peace Peace, but sadly I couldn't vote for it. And Israel! My country even gave them the highest score this year. (And every year before. You see, we still have to pay off our WW2 debts.) They have never ever voted for us though

I recently discovered this site for learning Japanese: https://www.renshuu.org I like it very much. It's far better than Anki for me, mainly because of one thing: it keeps me motivated. It manages my learning sessions for me, it uses a well defined dictionary and has many pre-compiled lessons (JLPT, Kanji Kentai, some popular textbooks) where you can make your "deck" from and you can choose what kind of questions you want to be ask (meaning, reading and such...). You can also input kana instead of using multiple choices for questioning. For kanjis, I have made two schedules for me. One for recognizing kanjis which is faster and covers more characters and one for actually reading them which also asks me for readings and radicals but introduces kanjis at a slower rate.

I know, but who knows, maybe I try it again sometimes? However, this goofiness is really something I can't stand. I recommended the game to a friend of mine because I wanted to see what he thinks and, guess what, he dropped it after some of the first goofy scenes, couldn't stomach the shift in tone either. So I think that's actually a valid point the reviewer makes. Not everyone likes to take goofy breaks between the actual good parts.

I quickly dropped this game after encountering these goofy interludes. That's probably a bigger issue than you think.

Funny how you all like the trailer. I was pretty alienated by it, to be honest, because it doesn't resemble the feeling I had while reading the VN. It looks to me like they try to make a generic emotional melodrama out of it. Planetarian however, in my opinion, was so good because it didn't try to do this (at least not until the end and even there I could kinda forgive it for this because it was earned).

Implying they turn bad when they get translated. That may be the case for the "writing" but surely not for more objective elements like characters or story. I'm sure there are plenty of VNs even Rooke with his elaborated tastes in fiction would like, but those will never get translated because they don't cater to the anime audience.

I guess when you say "most VNs" you mean "most VNs translated into English". Which is a very small and biased subset of all VNs.

The Rebirth games are horrible downgrades of the originals in nearly every regard and I don't understand why people don't see this. Like, did you even notice what made the originals games so great? Because nothing of this is left over in the remakes. The only thing that speaks for Rebirth 1 is the fact that the gameplay in the first Neptunia is indeed terrible, no sugarcoating possible. But still, the original script is way superior to the remake's even though the translation of the first Rebirth game is actually quite good because it wasn't ruined by Nick Doerr, unlike the others. There is no ambiguity with the other two games though. Those are in every regard inferior to their original counterpart. Neptunia mk2 was a very intelligent and witty commentary on the video game scene and on the Japanese otaku scene in general. The metaphors for the different topics it discussed were spot-on, story and characters were quite deep and thought-provoking. Nothing of this was left over in the remake. In fact, they killed every single instance of profundity by rewriting the story and the characters into a dumb moe fest while completely ruining the original point of the original story. (Not to mention that they dared to ruin the best ending (Conquest) by giving it a cheap cop-out ending and thus killing the point of it all.) Neptunia V wasn't a very deep game compared to mk2, so the remake couldn't ruin the story as much as it did for the second game, but instead here they completely ruined the best aspect of the third Neptunia game; the actual gameplay. Considering that every Rebirth game is based on Victory's game engine, I can't even fathom how it was possible to ruin this perfectly good gameplay system, but alas they did. They took every bit complexity, challenge and fun out of it and delivered instead a bland, linear, dead easy and totally forgettable experience. No evaluation after a chapter anymore which motivates you do to better and do quests earlier. No hard dungeons to explore early on because in the remake you never have the items to unlock them which means you can only unlock dungeons at specific points in the story when you are far overpowered already, so no challenge at all. Just to name a few issues with this. By the way, all three Rebirth games have exactly the same gameplay problems. They use Victory's engine and are implementing it so boringly redundant and tediously easy, there is no fun left. I said the gameplay in the first Neptunia was terrible, but at least you can remember it for how bad it was. Rebirth's system however is just boringly forgettable.

It's the current year and professional reviewers still don't understand the visual novel medium.

For me, it was the exact opposite. When I started reading VNs, I was a stupid teenager (13 years old I think) who wanted to see naked 2D girls; the more the better! Nowadays, when some "serious" looking romance story tries to pull a harem route on me, I ragequit instantly. I want to read a love story, not some juvenile porn fanfiction.

Thank you Rooke. That's what I thought. Still, I think "slut" refers to a woman who sleeps with a lot of men. That's not the case here. First, a slut can't be "chaste" like the title implies. Second, the character description clearly states that the sister is a virgin. She just has a brother complex and her brother's smell makes her horny... you know, like a "bitch" in heat. In my opinion, "slut" is even more wrong than "bitch". It's probably more something like "My lewd sister can't be this chaste".

Can someone enlighten me what the difference is? I don't understand why this is so important that Decay had to point it out.

Let me clarify that I wasn't implying that you or anyone who likes Silky's Plus' games has bad taste in eroge. There are not many eroge companies which show the evolution of the medium in the last decade as good as Silky's does. Silky's was always trying to be modern and popular while its parent company elf stayed true to its roots. When Silky's Plus was formed last year, it essentially sealed elf's death. Economically speaking, abandoning elf was the right decision, but it's also sad for me to see something I really liked die. For me, Silky's Plus is the perfect metaphor how the eroge scene changed throughout the years. I liked the old Silky's games made in the 90s. For me, those games were "good". When I read a Silky's Plus game, I can see many elements and influences from Silky's older games, but they are all interpreted completely different, you know, more modern. (Neyuki no Genei is the best example, it's nearly a remake of an older game.) And I hate it. Compared with their older games, everything is far worse in my opinion. Everything is a disimprovement. How the heroines are written, how they talk, how the routes are structured, how the MC behaves, and so on... But I'm in the minority here. Silky's Plus' games are immensely popular. Most people like them. The way these games are designed is exactly what the audience wants. This made me realize that I'm not part of the target audience anymore. What I want to see in an eroge is not what most people nowadays want to see. Silky's Plus' popularity and how I can't emphasize with it is the proof to my assumption. This make me feel even a bit lonely. Well, that was everything I wanted to say, really. If you really want to know what I deem "good", well, read some of elf/Silky's games from the 90s or early 00s. ^^

Silky's Plus is the worst thing that happened to the eroge scene in recent years and the fact that people like their games should really motivate me to finally commit sudoku... because if the majority of people think that this is what a "good" eroge looks like then there is really no reason to live for me anymore... since I will probably never get nice things again...

It's not about whether France allows 12 years old girls to watch porn or not. It's about catering to 12 years old animu fangirls who don't want to look at porn. The "12 year old girl" here is a metaphor for a very dominant type of anime fan who doesn't want to cross the border between ecchi and hentai even though he would legally be allowed to. Those people don't want. And this group was the target audience of MoeNovel.