Tyr

But I was the first to express a reasoned impression of the game. Aren't the people who deliberately disagree with me and are only arguing with "muh feels" the edgy ones?
Remember the time when "egdy" wasn't an insult used by third generation otakus to revile well thought out criticism of their favorite escapism outlets? Ah, good times.

It is as bad as I said it was in my post in the untranslated vn thread... and yes, everyone who liked it should be ashamed of himself. It is really that bad.

Anal huh? Well not too bad if I said it (As long as not in real life and between guy that is). Anyway, there's a lot if you want the examples and let me recommend Anal Mama (Untranslated), Miles (Translated and had female protagonist), and this one (Also untranslated). I don't know if those three will fulfill some of your wishes there, but good luck.

But I was the first to express a reasoned impression of the game. Aren't the people who deliberately disagree with me and are only arguing with "muh feels" the edgy ones?
Remember the time when "egdy" wasn't an insult used by third generation otakus to revile well thought out criticism of their favorite escapism outlets? Ah, good times.

you are too dark and edgy to fully appreciate a true kamige 

It is as bad as I said it was in my post in the untranslated vn thread... and yes, everyone who liked it should be ashamed of himself. It is really that bad.

But that game is not weird at all. It's actually an accurate depiction of German society and culture.

Well I finished Rettou Kan, and it was a pretty good nukige. The angel route was much better than the demon route in my opinion, though both were pretty... entertaining . If you are looking for a dark nukige, you should definitely pick this one up. Nice art, lots of unique scenes and the game doesn't really try to take itself too seriously at any point in the story, which I like in my nukige. (I mean, you know right away that you are playing a nukige when the main character is literally called "protagonist." So great  )
 
Still not done with all my Cyclet games, next up is Kasshoku no Sei Senshi Aisha, HD edition. I recently learned from Tyrosyn that the CGs have been cropped quite a bit in this version, which sucks, so I'll probably run the normal version next to it like I did with G-senjou no Maou. I know it's not a big deal most of the time, but I still hate CG cropping.
(And yes, I am definitely turning into a total Cyclet fanboy. They got me. I'm beyond saving. RIP.)

Spoiler warning!!!
 
 

kawarazaki-ke 2 - absolution/salvation
muramasa - deconstruction of heroism
shingakkou - deconstruction of human mind/psyche
kusarihime - deconstruction of humanity
reminiscence - deconstruction of ones world within
umineko - deconstruction of the genre itself
phantom of inferno - deconstruction of blind following
isaku/shuusaku/ kisaku - deconstruction of the genre itself
itsusora - deconstruction of ones expectations
be-yond - deconstruction of the (maou) genre itself
cross channel - shatterer of now & then
kagerou (by masaki kamo) - apostle of intense melancholia

I'm not really at my PC this week, so can't write longer walls of text at the moment. I don't mind you copying anything if you think it benefits this discussion.
I just wanted to chime in to say that Natsu no Kusari was by far the best eroge I have read in years, easily in my all time Top 3.
Also, everything @XReaper said is true. I also don't see Mangagamer licensing this game.
Interestingly, Natsu no Kusari has neither a cliched Stockholm plot, nor an protagonist doubting himself.
It's far from being your typical rapist escapism story. What makes this game so great is that it's more realistic and down to earth compared with similar games of this genre.

You are wrong...very wrong, yes there is a lot of sick shit going on in this vn(rape, torture, etc) but it's not just a "rape game" there is much more than that, specially with the plot, @Tyrosyn probably can explain it much better than I do (maybe if he doesn't feel like writing a whole lot I can just copy his explanation, I will ask him)
 

rather unlikely, since the staff of theirs views it as nothing but an arkward nukige, btw partly trashtalked the title itself.

edit: guess people who are reading natsu no kusari only for the porn are equivalent to those going for kawarazaki-ke2´s netorare. rip world, where have we gone wrong....

edit2: them picking up natsu no kusari would require having some balls since it´s a more realistic take on the matter, which i cant see happening as things stand for now - call me a pessimistic piece of crap, i know i know... but in a way it´s abit comparable to yabai!, a title i can´t see them doing either. potential social outcries are more easy to handle/avoid when sticking to fantasy, or settings that are strongly giving off a fictional vibe than their opposites, regrettably so. doesnt help that some readers seemingly can´t comprehend such matter, or refuse doing so by default.

hello.
if you want a peek into the dark side then message me, @Dergonu, @XReaper or @Tyrosyn, the only people worth a decent recommendation  

Thank you for proving my point.

Elysion is probably the epitome of Maid VNs. It's an indepth-discussion about the concept of Maids.
What is their purpose? What is their goal? What responsibilities do they bear and what are their rights? Are they a necessity or just luxury? Can you live without a Maid and if, is a life without a Maid even worth living?
Every character route has two endings, a waifu end and a maid end which in itself is the inevitable conclusion to the player's answers to the important philosophical questions the game raises in the course of the game's story.
A quick note of warning though: This game is best played together with your personal maid. If you don't have any, and you realize that you never will, you may feel the uncontrollable urge to commit sudoku after reading this novel.

I feel like Im the only person that finds escapism through imaginary characters misery

>learn japanese
>read black cyc vns
>profit!

You are not using the regex in ITH but in TA. ^^
You probably have a "Plugins" folder in your TA main directory. You can probably also find a "Replacements" folder in there in which a "names.txt" text files exists. This is used for regular expressions. Normally, it's used to substitute kanji names with romaji (hence the name), but you can use it for any substitution purpose really, which also includes simply the removing of garbage characters.
Every line in the names.txt is a regular expression with the regex first, then a tab, then the substitution. In my very simple examples here, the substitution would simply be nothing.
If you haven't installed TAplugin, you can also use the build-in substitution function of the core TA. It's essentially the same, but this time the file is located in the "dictionaries" folder as "UserDict.txt" and you can even use a GUI menu in TA itself to edit it (Tools --> Substitutions...").
The difference between names.txt and UserDict.txt is when and how it's applied. All UserDict expressions are read into memory at the time you open TA. If you have too much expressions in your file, TA needs longer to start up. But that also means that the UserDict.txt  substitutions are way faster than the ones you define in names.txt.
UserDict substitutions are applied before TA does anything else with the clipboard string. That means you won't notice it. (Before silly me knew about this feature, I always wondered why TA does some black magic with certain phrases. I later noticed I unknowingly installed a predefined UserDict ^^).
TAplugin substitutions can be computed before parsing or before translating. That means that the "Original Text" window will always contain the unaltered string (except you also use UserDict, be aware of that) while the translations will always be computed after applying the regex (obviously). You can choose whether to do the substitution before or after parsing the string with Mecab and JParser. The option is in your Taskbar Tray, search for the TAplugin icon.
I usually use names.txt because I like to have the option to (de-)activate specific regular expressions on the fly. You can deactivate everything by commenting out the line with an * and saving the text file with your editor of choice. Since the UserDict file is loaded into memory when TA initializes itself and not every time the clipboard updates, you can only deactivate substitutions as a whole during runtime.
By the way, VNR also has this feature. But it's a little bit clunkier here because the expressions are not saved in a text file but on the VNR server. TAHelper also uses a text file for substitutions. I don't think anyone uses this tool anymore though.

If you come across this problem in the future again, the easiest way (meaning you don't need to search for a new code) is simply to delete every instance of garbage characters via regular expressions.
In this case, you have some patterns you can use to filter the hooked strings.
For example, all the garbage characters are ASCII characters, so you could search for all strings which consist of only ASCII characters. Thanks to Unicode using the same range for ASCII as SJIS, you can always use this expression for this purpose:
[\x20-\x7F]* This would work fine if you never have ASCII in your game text. If this is too broad, you could also try to use underscores as a border marker since nearly every garbage line uses underscores in the beginning and the end of the string:
_.*_ This would delete everything except a "bu" before every important line in Thread 4, which is probably fine enough since these would be hooked anyway and don't interfere with your other threads. And you can be sure to never delete anything important because a VN script most certainly won't use the underscore character.
These are just some very simple examples to give you some pointers where to begin finding solutions the next you time have this problem.
Never do this. Use regular expressions instead. The only exception to this rule would be if there is only a small number of not common but very persistent characters.
Never overwrite ITHVNR releases. Every newer release might break something an older version was capable of. It has something to do with the way how VNR works from which ITHVNR steals its hooking algorithms.
It's different from the original ITH where every new release completely superseded the last.

Well, I finally got around to finishing Tokage no Shippo Kiri, and damn, it was pretty darn good. I definitely have to get around to playing the fandisk soon.
The game was really unique, and very interesting. I was expecting a rather shallow guro nukige, and got a tragic love story instead, which was really cool. The game was well written, the art was very nice (and damn, it had so many CGs considering it's length... Cyclet really pulled out all the stops in the CG/ art department for this one.) The characters were great, especially Shuu and Monobe, (that crazy bitch, lol.) The plot twists in the game kept taking me by surprise, and the dark atmosphere mixed with the romance was a very interesting combo.
The game overall just left me very satisfied with the way things were wrapped up in the routes, and I liked how you kind of have to play all the routes to truly understand reasons behind the characters' actions etc. (I was actually considering skipping Manaka's route. Glad I didn't, as the game would have felt a hell of a lot less impactful without it.)
 
I'm really liking these short Cyclet games. There is still a few that I haven't played yet that look interesting, so I'll have to get around to doing those.

You are not using the regex in ITH but in TA. ^^
You probably have a "Plugins" folder in your TA main directory. You can probably also find a "Replacements" folder in there in which a "names.txt" text files exists. This is used for regular expressions. Normally, it's used to substitute kanji names with romaji (hence the name), but you can use it for any substitution purpose really, which also includes simply the removing of garbage characters.
Every line in the names.txt is a regular expression with the regex first, then a tab, then the substitution. In my very simple examples here, the substitution would simply be nothing.
If you haven't installed TAplugin, you can also use the build-in substitution function of the core TA. It's essentially the same, but this time the file is located in the "dictionaries" folder as "UserDict.txt" and you can even use a GUI menu in TA itself to edit it (Tools --> Substitutions...").
The difference between names.txt and UserDict.txt is when and how it's applied. All UserDict expressions are read into memory at the time you open TA. If you have too much expressions in your file, TA needs longer to start up. But that also means that the UserDict.txt  substitutions are way faster than the ones you define in names.txt.
UserDict substitutions are applied before TA does anything else with the clipboard string. That means you won't notice it. (Before silly me knew about this feature, I always wondered why TA does some black magic with certain phrases. I later noticed I unknowingly installed a predefined UserDict ^^).
TAplugin substitutions can be computed before parsing or before translating. That means that the "Original Text" window will always contain the unaltered string (except you also use UserDict, be aware of that) while the translations will always be computed after applying the regex (obviously). You can choose whether to do the substitution before or after parsing the string with Mecab and JParser. The option is in your Taskbar Tray, search for the TAplugin icon.
I usually use names.txt because I like to have the option to (de-)activate specific regular expressions on the fly. You can deactivate everything by commenting out the line with an * and saving the text file with your editor of choice. Since the UserDict file is loaded into memory when TA initializes itself and not every time the clipboard updates, you can only deactivate substitutions as a whole during runtime.
By the way, VNR also has this feature. But it's a little bit clunkier here because the expressions are not saved in a text file but on the VNR server. TAHelper also uses a text file for substitutions. I don't think anyone uses this tool anymore though.

Serious game? We are still talking about ... clicker games here, right?

Ded thred
Here's a translated article about the history of Hentai Manga. Don't worry, you don't need to subscribe to read it
https://www.fakku.net/hentai/hentai-manga-a-brief-history-of-pornographic-comics-in-japan-english

I've continued to use Tenso despite them adding that rule. They continue to blithely mail my eroge on to me.