Dreamysyu

You can try to manually lower the resolution in Windows and see if it changes anything. In case you don't know how to do that, right-click on the desktop and go to display settings. Don't forget to change everything back after you finish playing. Actually, I get similar problems on my laptop from time to time. You may try this: right-click on the game's exe-file, go to properties and compatibility. If the button "Change high DPI settings" appears, try to press it, check "Override high DPI scaling behavior" and try different options there. It may look a bit different in different versions of Windows though.

Well, this was definitely a lot easier this time.

Type-Moon VNs have a lot of that, obviously. I periodically like to hype myself about Umineko and Higurashi in a similar way. Most VNs don't really have that much content you can use to hype about them, sadly.

Not exactly that, but comes pretty close at times.

JAST.

Still playing Eien no Aselia. Done with Lesteena's route, and it was pretty disappointing. It didn't really add much to the story or her character compared to what you could get from the common parts of the story, and the ending was pretty unsatisfying. I'm glad I started with Aselia. Well, this game is definitely massive. I only finished two out of seven routes at this point, but according to the in-game clock I already played for 120 hours. Strangely enough, I still didn't lose my interest. On second playthrough I wasn't even skipping that much text. Some scenes definitely made a lot more sense after I knew where the story was going, and this made me reevaluate my opinion about this game's story. So, I'm going for Esperia's route in the next playthrough! And I'm definitely not going to play in the super hard mode for now. The hard mode was pretty easy at first, I was getting SS and S rank in pretty much all missions, but then, starting with the mission where you attack the Empire, it suddenly got HARD. I guess, I messed up with choosing who to level up, because at some point I started running out of mana, and none of my blue spirits had banish skills to deal with the new red support magic, which was instantly killing all of my green spirits. In the end, I had to make a squad with Aselia as the attacker, Yuuto as the defender and Kouin as the supporter to deal with these squads, and to quickly level up all blue spirits when I got the chance. And, even though I managed to play almost entire game without letting anyone die, in the final mission I had to sacrifice an entire squad of secondary characters to make the final boss run out of his support magic. Rest in peace, Selia, Shiah, Nim.

Happy Birthday to @Eclipsed!

You just weren't paying attention. There are plenty of people on this forum who didn't like it. As for the topic of this thread, I don't really think any of this year's releases I played were really bad. Well, Hapymaher and Grisaia no Rakuen (which technically came out last year) were pretty disappointing, but they weren't really bad. On the other hand, I also played Phenomeno... And, to be honest, this time I simply cannot understand why this is so popular.

I played about 15 VNs this year and finished 9, which is actually quite a lot for me. At the same time, none of the VNs I finished this year are that long. Overall, this year I regained some of my original interest for VNs, which I was slowly losing ever since I finished MLA in 2015. Though they probably deserve to be somewhere in this list, I'm omitting Dies Irae and Seabed since I didn't get that far into these VNs, and there's a good chance that my impression will change later on. 1. Fata Morgana - Requiem for Innocence. Even being a fandisk, this one clearly became my number one, without any real competition. It's not only a nice addition to the original story, but also a very good story in itself that will work perfectly well on its own. 2. Aselia the Eternal. I'm reading this right now, and I've only finished one route so far, but this game is pretty linear, so I think the other parts of the game will be the same. Well, I didn't really expect much from the game when I just started it, but overall this was a nice surprise. Well, I know that this game isn't perfect. There are a lot of very noticeable plot holes, and they definitely could structure the story a lot better. At the same time, the combination of interesting characters, nice ideas, and engaging gameplay makes the experience worth it. 2.5. I guess, Seabed should be here. 3. Chuusotsu. A cute short story that tries to touch some really important themes about an individual's place in society. 4. The Labirinth of Grisaia. The after stories are mostly forgettable, but Yuuji's backstory makes a pretty nice read. 5. Cinderella Phenomenon. Not the best story I've ever read, but still pretty nice. As for the biggest disappointments this year, this title will go to Phenomeno and Grisaia no Rakuen.

Most likely, because Type-Moon don't want it to be officially picked up.

Mutt du rid Clannad or mutt du dai?

. . . Happy New Year!

Umineko

Skimmed through the first episode of Eien no Aselia OVA. Well, I thought the idea of adapting 50+ hour long VNs like Grisaia or Rewrite into 13 episodes of anime was already pretty stupid. Now I know that somebody actually thought it was a good idea to condense a 50+ hour long VN into 2 episodes of anime.

Quite an interesting experiment. :-) On the other hand, extrapolating these results to human society is imo a bit risky and may have some dangerously incorrect implications. Humans have a lot more ways to entertain themselves, and, unlike mice, they are perfectly capable of looking for the meanings of their own lives even without external troubles. Unlike mice, we have art and science, and at the same time we will never be able to create the same type of utopia for ourselves, there are just too many of us on this planet. So, I don't know, I wouldn't pay the results of this experiment too much attention. And, to be honest, I never really liked this part in Tokyo Babel, for similar reasons.