Tyr

Because virgin writers don't know how women work.

Yes, and laws don't have accomodate to YOU. If it's legal it's not necessarily right, but what YOU think it's right is worthless. If you really want to change the law, study politics, work your way up the ladder to a power position, get elected democratically by the citizens of your country, and then, with society's approval, change what you think must be changed.
As long as I'm not breaking the law of my country or the place I'm currenly in (and this even applies to fuwanovel), yes, I'm not doing anything wrong by any objective standard. I hope you realize how dangerous it is to say otherwise. I hope you do, but I know you most likely don't, because I can already tell you are one of those people who believe there's nothing wrong with mob justice.
Honestly the fact that you put forward the fact that 'fuwanovel allows Trump supporters' as a reason -even if you made clear it's not your main reason- for wanting to leave, says a lot about your stance. Just for the record, I'm not even American and couldn't care less about EEUU's politics, but I know for a fact that he's been elected democratically, so allow me to ask who the hell are you to shit on a big chunk of EEUU's population? I can't see where's the respectful part about calling Trump voters bigots, and expressing that, in your opinion, they shouldn't even be allowed in a forums that has nothing to do with politics, since, in your words, that's condoning bigotry.
The same goes for lolicon content and violent sexual content. Maybe you can't easily separate reality and fiction, but I can assure you that most of the people who consume lolicon content are not attracted to real children, and the wet dreams of most people who consume rape content is not raping a real woman. Insinuating otherwise is insulting people by calling them potential criminals. 

You should not touch anything from NekoHen, not even the interface patches! This guy has no clue what he's doing, neither in Japanese nor in English. Even something as simple as an interface translation he completely screws up.
If you want to play an Eushully game without knowing enough Japanese to read everything without tools, the only good solution is to use ITH with a good H-Code which captures everything and then linking the important threads together.
Except for Arterial and Madou Koukaku. These two have great interface patches you can safely use. But don't use NekoHen, never ever.
I was kinda the same. I absolutely hated the storyline of making everyone your bitch (by raping, but that's perfectly fine because you are such an overpowered alpha male!), but the card battle system was great.
I didn't think the battle system was very grindy or easy to exploit though. I had a lot of fun making different elemental decks, because every element uses a slightly different strategic approach and building a good deck around this was pretty challenging and interesting. There were always some harder enemies to fight against to test your skills. Good balancing.
They reused the same system in Tou no Shita no Exercitus but completely broke the game mechanics by introducing game breaking overpowered cards thus ruining the whole game. It's a shame, because it had the potential to be a light hearted version of Verethragna.
I really can't stand Astronaut Sirius's approach to dark nukige. OP protagonist, a harem of retarded bitches, boring villains, uninteresting linear story. Dungeon of Regalias is exactly the same ... and I played it nonetheless because I'm a sucker for good gameplay and Astronaut Sirius delivers in this regard. ~.~

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.

I'm over 18 and I think that this is perfectly acceptable behavior even in real life.
If you guys think otherwise you're probably feminists or something stupid like that. What's wrong with you, screaming "rape, rape, rape" over and over again? It's common knowledge that women like to be harshly taken by the man they like. Asking for "consent" is one of the dumbest things social justice warriors invented in the last few years (aside from the other stupid things). As if this is not a total mood breaker... when you have something interesting going on and suddenly you're like "oh, I hope this is ok for you. please say if I'm not gentle enough. I don't want to really hurt you." That's how you ruin the mood, lol.
You think you are some white knights, pointing out harmless situations which aren't 100% political correct, and you're thinking you're doing women a favor with this. Ridiculous. Not only are you denying grown-up people the right to decide for themselves how to engage with each other (for example, being fine with it when somebody takes your "no" as a "yes" because you actually like this), you're also generalizing hot kink with serious, criminal rape. That's disgusting.

Confession: Today, I broke up with my waifu. Not that something was wrong, it's just time to move on. Being single is still the best, yo!

Well, I didn't want to be that guy, but I felt I should say something given that this has gotten nothing but positive comments and no real criticism, good or bad, so far.
I'm sorry, but I just can't like this. You're taking a perfectly fine game and porting it to Ren'py while destroying everything unique about it, I just find this to be disrespectful to the original work.
Fixing misTLs and translating what was left untranslated? Sure, I'd say that's awesome. This game was translated 23 years ago, there were different standards back then, JAST was just starting out and perhaps not the most qualified team was working on it, but this was literally one of the first steps for translated eroge. While it totally wouldn't be good enough nowadays, I think it's wrong to hate on the translation or a few rewrites. I see it as a as something left behind from JAST's humble beginnings. Fixing the names is pretty cool, considering the furigana was given for the names, I can only imagine that the translator had to rush to meet deadlines or that this project itself was a risky bet from the Japanese developers (so the priority was speed).
Adding alternate tracks, mosaic toggle and such are all cool bonuses and that's what they should be - nothing more, nothing less. I like fiddling with these options myself, so I'm sure most people will find it to be a warm welcome. Maybe people would appreciate something like a JP/EN language toggle if that is even possible, but sounds like too much work.
Adding CGs or tachi-e from other games that don't even have anything to do with Sakura no Kisetsu or Tiare makes no absolute sense. It'd be a completely different story if they were unused assets, but they weren't there to begin with, and they don't fit in there. I mean, I've seen similar projects that make bold choices, but they always keep it optional. Just think what a mess translation projects would be if people did just whatever they wanted.
You also took the original, beautiful pixel art and uh...smoothened it out, or whatever you may call it, and completely destroyed it. At the end of the day, this is an originally PC-98 game and should be reminded as such. This is not to say that the JAST Memorial Edition is good either. In fact, it looks horrible, mostly because of the "blurry background" window border that makes it hard to look at, that and the font. Meanwhile the DOS version still exists (but it's not being sold anymore? not sure) and is perfectly playable on DOSBOX, even on fullscreen. So, why?
And finally, the gameplay. Personally, I hate verb-based gameplay, even more so the kind where you have to pixel hunt to get to the next scene. But I think above anything else, it's wrong to remove a fundamental part of this game, turning it into something it wasn't. Playing Sakura no Kisetsu with verb-based gameplay might be a bit annoying in 2019, now that we're used to other types of gameplay, but by removing it, would we truly be playing Sakura no Kisetsu? I think not really.
 
Just to make this clear, I don't think this is "awful". Fixing the text and giving the game a better treatment than it could've afforded to have at the time is great, and I wish the same could be done for older games that have an awful translation, such as Divi-dead. I really dislike what you've done with the art, even more so considering how out of place the pixel art character sprites feel, but maybe it'd be possible to include an option to keep the original pixel art, just like Memorial Edition does (at least that's what it says). I'm sure you are passionate about this project and deeply care about it, or else you wouldn't have put so much effort into it - something the regular user wouldn't be able to, unless they were adequately skilled and/or were extremely dedicated. I just think this is bad in terms of concept - you mocked JAST's message of wanting to preserve the original as much as possible, but you're doing quite the opposite based solely on whims, is how I feel. Anyway, this is just my opinion - feel free to do as you wish. However, I'm pretty sure this isn't very legal, considering JAST is still selling this game, but that's up to them to take action.
I hope that my feedback, even the negative parts can be of help to you. Cheers.

It's an interesting post but there's a few false equivalents. Such as, this company is successful, so it means that their marketing/business strategy is the recipe for success. Well, without sales figures it's quite difficult to tell for certain, but I'd say these games are sucessful for different reasons.
For example, Neptunia was poignant at the time for its meta-commentary on RPGs, overused tropes and videogames in general. In reality, the gameplay is quite lacking, even on the remake, and the story gets old pretty fast, becoming a victim of the tropes it parodies. Although, it is important to note that the remake was rewritten, while the original had a more interesting and fresh story.
Nekopara's success has a lot to owe to its short length, cheap price, beautiful art by Sayori and most of all, the E-mote system (whatever you may call it). That is, having the characters move and breathe, as if they were really alive inside our very screens.
 
But beautiful art, a cool story and characters...blah, blah, blah, none of that matters. What matters is memes.
No matter how good or bad Neptunia was at the time, it became popular because of its almost cult following in communities like 4chan, where many gamers for the first time felt that they were playing a game made for them specifically, as people, through the use of constant forth wall breaks. They felt that the characters resembled them in certain ways and it helped strengthen this bond between them. Over time, I'd say that Neptunia de-evolved into mere yuri bait, but I risk triggering the anger of many fans.
Nekopara instantly became known as "the game where you can fuck cute catgirls". To those people who weren't deep enough into otaku culture to know about the existence of bishoujo games, Nekopara might've been their first contact with the genre. And what can I say, it helps that it doesn't beat around the bush with an overcomplicated plot, to the point where it can almost be labeled a "moenukige". Above all, this game is important because it is an escapism fantasy for us humans, who live in a world ruled by cats, giving us the illusion that for once we can rule over the cats.
What these games have in common is being poignant at the time, offering something fresh or never-before-seen...but it's difficult to predict that a game will or not spread like wildfire on social media. An example would DDLC, which is innovating in a way because of how it messes with your game files, but it got popular thanks to its shock factor. It also helps that it's short and a free-to-play game.
 
So, the idea of releasing a translation on as many languages as possible isn't exactly worthwhile especially since most people can speak English and most eroge aren't exactly Shakespearan novels either...and while it is important for Japanese developers to take in account the foreign audiences when making their game, they run the risk of adapting the game to fit certain standards or values, robbing them of what made us like them in the first place.

I searched through my magazines and I found this one covering nearly every eroge from 1982 till 2000 with the most influential and popular getting bigger coverage. This may be something for you.
It's called: パソコン美少女ゲーム歴史大全1982-2000
The first 25 pages are featuring the most popular eroge from 1982 till 1996 which essentially means the timespan before eroge went to Windows.
Obviously, there are also many hidden gems which aren't popular but nonetheless quite good. Ushinawareta Rakuen is one of those.
Nearly every game by Fairytale is good, especially the two Fairytale Hardcover games Necronomicon and Ballade for Maria. Elf, Silky's and Mink are companies spawned from Fairytale so you will find many good games here too.
I also like Fairy Dust. Maybe you have seen the Anime Cream Lemon with its many short storys? Fairy Dust is the company behind this series and they also made many eroge which are often sequels to the anime episodes.
I also like Jealousy (made by Interheart). Good story, great animations.
There are also many good RPGs and non-H visual novels.
There is also a version of this game for FM Towns. Sadly, it's only a floppy version without any improvements over the original.

>staff info
hell yeah
>professionally approved
hell no lul

The Internet did it. The Internet really did it.
One year of extensive shitposting and meme-magic made it possible: Trump will not only make Anime real, he also won the presidential election.

Proof that Trump will make Visual Novels great again!
I thought the Jews (meaning George Soros) would rig the election, but apparently Democracy actually works!
I'm so happy for you my dear Murricans. You stood up and defeated the liar, warmonger and criminal Hillary Clinton.
From today on, the Internet shall be free from Social Justice and Political Correctness. Please search on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and everywhere else for SJWs and LGBT people and troll them to your heart's content!
My fellow Fuwas. I hereby declare the Western Eroge community once again a PC-free zone!
Rejoice, you don't need to fanboy LGBT-writers like Scaji and pretentious works like Subahibi anymore. Don't hide your true desires, just fap to your alpha-male nukiges!
Even better if it's an incest eroge where you can date your daughter, because that is exactly what our savior would also do!

And now please excuse me, I have to grab some anime pussy ... and I won't even ask for consent!
(Tagging other white cis scum males, because they wanted to celebrate with me: @Deep Blue and @XReaper )

The Order of Restoration presents you with Trample on Schatten uncensoring patch https://mega.nz/#!HxxThYrI!gcJEwW-cwJIiWWnMVLWx_Z3AQgS07mKKUFHtifKeBOA

Haha, that's exactly my genre. The following recommendations have a (good) story and aren't (just) gruesome gorefests. I will not mention the most obvious ones (most Black Cyc games, Innocent Grey, some of elf's masterpieces like Kawarazaki-ke no Ichizoku 2 or all the games which are easily found on vndb with the death of heroine tag). I will also only mention games which have a value beside killing girls. These are good eroge which happen to include the killing of heroines as an important aspect of the story (which makes them obviously even better):
 
Heaven -Death Game-:
Main character wins a trip to a deserted island. But as soon as he gets there, a Battle Royale starts and he must kill the other participants to survive. And contrary to most other Battle Royale visual novels... he will kill. This VN is an RPG and you can even decide whether you want new members in your party, or just kill them, hehe. This game has probably the most beautiful death CGs I have ever seen (that's Mink for you) and the story is interesting at first. Sadly, the game is far to easy and you probably don't trigger the really sick events because you are just to good at killing the others.
By the way, look at this delicious teaser: 
3M -Marionettes manipulate the marionette-:
Most people think that this is just a guro nukige, but that's not true. The horror writing is brilliant, characters and story are very engaging. Only downside is that it will probably never get its concluding chapter.
Hotaruko:
Very good mystery game about your girlfriend and her past you're trying to uncover. Best thing is this nice feature while killing innocent little girls that the animation of the scene is linked to you mouse movement. It's like an interactive killing mini game! Very satisfying. I wish more games had a feature like this.
 
Some other games where your heroines die horribly, but your main character is not involved in the act of killing (or is he?):
Love Letter:
Kinda like Kara no Shoujo, the girls around you get killed and you don't know why and want to solve this mystery. Game starts as a nice horror flick, then evolves into some kind of detective story. Story is good and the conclusion satisfying.
Omokage:
Probably the most gory non-doujin eroge. You are trapped in a mansion and need to escape before you and your friends get killed. Pretty slasher horror-like. Don't look at the screens on its vndb page, they're endgame spoilers.
13-nin no Uruwashiki Kedamono:
Story is about 13 trapped individuals and the death game they are forced to play. Main character and heroines are pretty bland, secondary characters and their relationships and background stories however are great. Death scenes and CGs are very beautiful (Mink again). Not really a very good game story-wise but the setting and the secondary characters are written very well.
 
I didn't check before I started writing because there were far to many to bother. Please forgive me. OTL

No?  You speak as if somehow a game is less than the sum of its parts: that a game's gameplay detracts from other elements, and vice versa.  I specifically look for titles that have gameplay AND the other qualities I'm looking for.  By the way, sexual training is actually NOT one of the elements I value.  I just don't believe in gutting major themes for the sake of mere convenience.  The game is supposed to have those scenes, and if you don't want to see them you can 1) not trigger them or 2) disable those H-scenes in the configuration menu.
How does removing story arcs that revolve around H-scenes not affect the story?  And in regards to writing, have you heard of the rule "show, not tell"?  That rule applies here.

How on earth would taking corruption scenes out of a game about sexual corruption be in any way satisfactory to the primary audience?  That's literally the main selling point.  It's a core gameplay mechanic and has entire story arcs devoted to it (optional, but incentivized by gameplay mechanics).  The gameplay is great but you can't just excise a major theme and claim it "wasn't important".

Umineko hands down. While it is one of the best known and the most popular translated VNs, many people seem to ignore how unique it actually is (and I am not talking merely about the fact that it does not take place in high school). If we include VNs, LNs, WNs, Manga and western literature, I have read over 3000 volumes of literature (though majority of which consist of manga), but I am yet to find a more unique story.
Umineko is:
Murder mystery Modern Fantasy Commentary on the detective genre And does a lot of other stuff romance, philosophy, breaking the 4th wall etc. Furthermore, it claims to be a kinetic novel (aka no choices) and technically has only 1 relevant choice for the ending, but manages to crush even that, by making player do not a physical, but a mental choice how to treat this story. At the same time it can be both: pure murder mystery without fantasy elements and a pure fantasy story.
I could go all day, but I think this much is enough for the explanation.

The last three questions in this thread, all asked by an account registered solely for the purpose of asking these questions:
[Lamputa]:                        ITH Updater doesn't work!
[Tyr]:                                Don't use the ITH Updater. Download the newest ITH release instead.
[Razur]:                            ITH Updater doesn't work!
[sanatlig]:                         Don't use the ITH Updater. Download the newest ITH release instead.
[The man with no name]:  ITH Updater doesn't work!
I'm out.

Hello guys, it's me, Bee, and as someone who has experienced the so called "EOP" spectrum of the community and slowly but surely being able to see through the lens of the "JOP" spectrum I'll throw in my two cents and give an opinion of what this community is, or at least define what the outlying problems within it are.
Since I don't want to get this post deleted because "muh drama" and "negativity" or some of that crap mods like to make up sometimes I'll just give general outlines and not specify or go very deep into things. 
I'll start the summary by going to everyone's favourite place to hang out these days with other "vn enthusiasts" which is Reddit:
Community: the majory of dwellers inside here are either EOP's (yes, I said EOP's, get triggered) or elitist JOP's whose sole role in their lives is to shit on everything and anything; it doesn't matter if it's a fantl or a "professional" translation. Examples: "Oh my god, this translation has sub-par English and I, even if I'm a native/polish-english speaker but haven't worked as an editor ever before, would've done this way better. I pity the low-iq mongers who like this and blah blah blah..." you can get the gist of what I'm talking about. (Spoiler alert: not everyone in Reddit is like this, this is just my conception in general of what it represents now and what it has always represented.)
Modding: I have not much to say in regards to reddit modding, but as far as I know and it goes I really don't see glaring issues with it. Mods don't seem biased when deleting posts like in other subreddits and they let every cancerous thread be in general, so that's my take on it. (I don't visit reddit so I'm most likely 99% wrong here, so no flame for this.)
And now it's time for Fuwa小説 (Shousetsu is "novel" for the EOP's):
Community: I honestly feel like there's a mix of a lot of people and personalities in general. It feels like in general this is a "more friendly" community in a sense, it's too PC for my tastes in general, but no matter who you are you'll end up finding people to be around within here if you look hard enough (I mean, just look at my cancerous ass.) It has way more EOP's than JOP's in general and it probably lacks elitism, which shies away potential drama which could, in short, generate more conversations. Elitism is cancer, but it's a necessary cancer, and it creates discussion, compared to just accepting new people who "Have just read Doki Doki or Grisaia and they already think they'll never read anything before." JOP's are partly right when they refer to original works being better, spoiler alert, they are because translations never deliver what the author intended, and no matter how good the translator is the majority of these games have what makes them special, taken from them. ANyways, I'm derailing too much. In general, there's a broader spectrum of people here, way less than reddit, which leads to the false belief that "we" are more cohesioned, which is a lie. I've never seen such categorization and grouping as I've seen in this medium ever. Then again, I've not been to many mediums either so yeah.
Modding: and the last point I mention falls back on the topic of modding in this website. I'll try to sum it up saying that the mod team as it is right now feels like good modding consists solely on deleting posts that are "harmful" or "incite hate." I know that there are probably other duties you have to fulfill as a mod, but as far as I'm concerned deleting posts and handing bans without reason / warning seems to be the priority now, god bless. 
Now, inb4 angry mods come and say "You have two warning posts for trolling, lmao." Firstly, I am not putting as an example my personal experiences here because my warnings were justified (TLDR; I told someone to kill himself in a post and I created troll threads personally attacking Okami.) The issue stems from things like deleting a SoU DeSukA meme with a spongebob picture in a thread that was talking about localizations or something like that, or literally deleting a post that says "Kiri rules this community" in this thread. Mods need to start discerning which posts are clearly toxic and which posts are just friendly banter. Derailing is a shit reason to hide posts and everyone derails in general at some point. Inb4 my post is derailing.
The last point I want to touch is that some of the mods have a tendency to stick their noses where they shouldn't be doing it. My recommendation would be to stick modding in Fuwanovel and it's official Discord and stop trying to meddle with other servers that have nothing to do officially with it. If you want to do so become a mod of said server. (Inb4 omg Bee this drama with the FuwaSpammers Discord server again? Yes, it needs to be addressed because I found it literally ridiculous.) *Inb4 people say that this is an excuse to roast the mods in this forum. I won't deny that maybe that's the case.
Now, aside from these, I'll rebute some points from certain users:
People have to start realizing that the "professional" spectrum of the scene in a general sense is full of amateurs and people who just get hired starting from a fantranslation background. I'm not saying that some of them turn out to be good, or that there are no pros in the scene, which is false, but the majority of the industry (both in the translation/editing grounds and the company management and companies'-side of things it's full of young people and amateurs who just jump at the scene hoping they succeed and have some luck with their releases, no matter how bad things are handled in a general sense. 
I don't mind people that defend companies in general, but I'll admit that those persons are either:
1) "Shills" that literally work for said company, won't say names.
2) People that will always buy everything from VN companies as long as the text is slightly readable in English and has anime boobs / anime art + japanese voices.
Also, if someone defends Sekai Project at this point I'll actually think that either they have mental disabilitities or are in a state of complete denial about how they need to burn to the ground.
Negativity stems from being in this medium too long and seeing the same shit happen over and over again or from being or becoming an old person. There are more "old" people in this community that people seem to believe.
EVN's in a general standpoint are complete and utter trash that need to be removed from this planet. The majority of them follow the same patterns and the majority of companies behind them don't fall behind on the schedule:
1) Either copy the format of Japanese VN's (why calling them EVN's then in the first place? Call them Japanesey VN's in English at this point) or generally make a theme that contains as much degeneracy as possible (I can't count the number of times I've seen the topic of "gay/trans protagonist in an even gayer/transier adventure). *Not all EVN's are like these are a very few amount are decent reads.
2) Companies that make them follow the Sekai Project mindset of doing a kickstarter as a backup plan in case they utterly fail selling it (and they will in most of the cases) so they don't suffer money loss. Stop spamming Patreons and Kickstarter campaigns, it gets boring and abusing the crowdfunding system is not the best way to gain support.
Anyways, I think that's all the ranting I'll do. Maybe I derailed a bit but whether or not that's the case we'll see it soon, as the mods like to categorize mine or any of "HMN's Crew" posts as troll in the first place.
 

It's kind of amusing that the OP gets immediately adviced to drop moege's to avoid disappointment, if the only VN he didn't drop and even considered very good was a 100% pure moege with little to no story or drama parts. Do people even read posts before answering anymore those days?

This isn't anything new - a bunch of studios experimented with such ways of storytelling. LittleWitch was the most notable company - they developed their own FFD (Floating Frame Director) engine to handle such text bubbles and used them in their games since 2002.
Only when you don't know how to handle their engines. Most games don't have them hard-coded and FFD's text bubbles are fully customizable.

I will always stand by this, no shitty bloated SoL, everything felt relevant, something the writers people consider to be the kamiges of the kamiges cant stop doing (looking at you masada)

This is a common trope in scifi novels. It's not like Kanno invented this theory. He simply used this as a means to make the story look more complex than it actually is by explaining pointless backstory in the end. Which is a practice that was common back then. Elle, which was also published by elf a few years earlier, also used an elaborate scifi infodump in its epilogue to make the game appear more complex and meaningful than it actually was. Incidentally, both games take place in a seemingly normal town where you spend most of the time trying to bed waifus while some mystery is going on in the background and at the end of the game you have a long epilogue that tries to explain everything with science fiction twists.
I don't see how YU-NO is anything special. I don't think science fiction visual novel writers only played this one eroge. That's like saying Ever 17 was influenced by Elle because both games' twists are based on a misconception of when the story actually takes place. Instead of the more plausible explanation that these tropes are simply popular concepts scifi writers like to use. And were already using for decades in literature and cinema.

Being popular does not matter in any way if you want to make an interesting statement about a genre or medium. Popularity does not say anything about a work itself, just about the time and environment it was released in, and even then you can't really make educated guesses about the reasons for its popularity because it's hard to find trustworthy sources when everyone tries to infer success from quality post hoc.
Popularity is poison for historic research because it's a catalyst for muddling the truth, especially if it is a field like video games where history is written by non-academics who write misinformed blog posts which later become sources for even more misinformed articles.
This thread is a good example for this:
I can name you a dozen pre-YU-NO VNs that influenced each other, formed the multiple route mystery genre and were the inspiration for YU-NO. But nobody cares about them, right? Because YU-NO is the one everybody remembers talks about. And because it is the only eroge from that era people even know, they are very quick to make outrageous statements to explain why it is the one that is still talked about today. Like the first reply in this thread ("YU-NO also created the Multiple Route Mystery genre") which is hilariously wrong since we talk about one of the last games of an era that was the golden age of mystery adventures where nearly every VN that wasn't a linear mystery adventure was a multiple route mystery adventure. How is it even possible to make such a grave mistake? Well, the poster probably read this false statement somewhere on the Internet where a number of misinformative reviews and comments about YU-NO exist, written by people who don't know anything about the time and context YU-NO was released in but want to make explanations why it's such a good game and why it's still talked about today. However, this is all baseless conjecture, essentially historical revisionism.
I didn't say that popularity can't be an interesting topic to explore. But that wasn't what I was talking about. What I wrote in my last comment was that none of the aforementioned VNs are innovative. Their popularity can't be explained solely by their content since VNs like these already existed for years. OP asked for VNs that were important. However, being popular does not make something important (though it certainly can be both). But we should refrain from inferring importance from popularity.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly. You are probably referring to me saying YU-NO is not particularly innovative, aren't you?
As far as I see it, YU-NO implements two concepts; multi-branched intersecting routes in the first part and an isekai world in the second part. Both are things you can already see in Kanno Hiroyuki's earlier works and are not that uncommon in other vns from that time either. (I don't want to make a statement what was the "first", I don't believe I have the knowledge to do that.)
However, it's not like the different routes are interfering with each other story-wise. As far as I remember it's nothing more than taking an item from one route to use it in another. The links between the second and first part of the game are not that different from what you can see in a time travel story. The multiverse stuff that comes up at the end of the story is not really more than background information and not part of the actual story while there are also a multitude of other VNs implementing some kind of space/time cop trope.
The reason I said it's not that innovative is because I don't think YU-NO does anything "new". What it does however is taking every trope that was already there and blends it together in one big epos. I think the reason YU-NO is remembered today is that it's the culmination of everything Kanno did so far and he never really tried to surpass it afterwards. However, if we are looking outside of Kanno's oeuvre, we can find many other VNs that explored and expanded on the genre in a similar or even different fashion.
If you mean multiverse theories as in "multiple routes that connect with each other" like in Higurashi, for example D.O.'s Zatsuon Ryouiki has a multiple route mystery where the protagonist can remember stuff from other routes. A few years after YU-NO, elf released Kawarazaki-ke no Ichizoku 2 which is based on the flowchart and multiple route mystery concept introduced in YU-NO but expands on it and tells a story where visiting multiple routes is essential for the protagonist and the reader and everything is deeply connected with each other and not just an alternative reality on its own.
As far as I see it, YU-NO is an important link in the evolution of the genre, but I don't think it's a beginning or an end.

If I have learned anything from having played over a thousand VNs from the 80s till today, it's that pretty much everything that is written on the Internet about the history of VNs is wrong, even the articles written by Japanese people.
For example, there is nothing particular innovative about Kanon, YU-NO, To heart or Higurashi. The only reason that these novels are always mentioned in the context of "being the first of something" is that they are popular. And because people like to simplify everything and want their favorite VNs to be very special, they are very quick to give out awards based on their feeling of "this must be something special because I haven't seen anything else like this" even thought these people don't have the expertise to be able to make these kinds of statements.
This is especially dangerous with the younger generation which likes to generalize about the past since social media encourages them to enter discussions about their hobbies, but are too lazy and ignorant to actually do the research. And because people nowadays don't want to read articles and news based on truths but rather want to read something that simply confirms their narrow worldview, these lies and made-up facts are quickly going viral. And if everyone says it, it must be true.
History is written by the popular VNs. Just as it is with anime, video games, movies, books etc.