Dreamysyu

Blasphemy! It definitely resolved a problem of our inevitable demise as a species for a few million years!

Well, I read them sometimes, when there is a good chance that I'll miss something if I just launch the app. Otherwise, I just skip them.

I'd guess, 90% of all VN companies would die, and the other 10% would stick to making shitty VN sin-offs for popular anime. Though, in any realistic type of scenario they will probably just find some loophole to continue selling eroge, at least in a heavily censored state. By the way, what exactly do you mean by marketing here? I remember you describing Japanese stores that sell eroge, but is there anything else?

A lot of people would be very confused about how a certain group of VNs with bad plots always sold so well. They would be even more confused to find lots of them on their PCs and recalling that they enjoyed them for some reason. Some might even suspect that there's something wrong with their heads. Hehehe.

Do you think, in this messed up world from my imagination, they would annihilate eroge and spare doujin manga?

@InvertMouse Will this work?

I am not sure if we mean the same thing by the word "complete" here. To me, I completed the game if I reached all story-relevant ending, and, in case of story-based VNs, got all the information important to understand the plot. I agree, in case of Clannad reaching all the content in the game may be demanding, but, in some cases, it may not be even relevant. On the other hand, I believe, you should be able to reach the ending to the After Story without using a walkthrough, because that's what basically means winning the game. I am not sure how possible this is since I only finished one route, but if you need a walkthrough for that, I can't agree with that. On the other hand, in some cases it's not even possible to understand from the ending to the game that there still are story-relevant endings. I am going to use SubaHibi as an example, because this is where I noticed it. Basically, there is one ending that unlocks after you cleared all the other endings (I think?), but there is nothing in the game that actually shows you that the new ending appeared. You are, most likely, at 100% CG completion at this point, there is no ending list. Basically, at some point in the game a new choice appeared, and you can only notice that if you replay the game. They might've wanted to add it as a secret ending, but what's the point for that if it actually has important information for understanding the story? My personal opinion: there should be something in the game that indicate that this ending exists. CGs, actually, are a nice way to show that there's still something relevant in the story left, but I would certainly prefer a simple ending list. PS. Basically, I think VN, as games, should have clear conditions for winning.

Definitely. On the other hand, I don't think that the players should feel that they need to use a walkthrough simply to enjoy a VN. When it comes to situations where it's possible to miss content if you simply made a wrong choice at some point, without any clear indication that you lost that content, or if some endings are simply impossible to reach on our own, we pretty much have to use a walkthrough. This is what I believe is wrong.

True, but technically this is not how things should be. While it's true that most people prefer to read VNs rather than play, if they present themselves as computer games, then they need to follow basic rules all computer games follow. For example, a player should be able to complete the game without relying on walkthoughs.

Yeah, definitely. Maybe, not the bad endings, but at least the good ones. I think, the main reason why not all VNs have that is because it's supposed to be "fun" to look for secret endings, but, honestly, I see little fun in it if I don't even know where to look. Though an ending list would work just as fine. And I realize that I would definitely skip the last ending in SubaHibi if I wasn't following a walkthrough.

Well, it's simply a hypothetical question, of course. It's an impossible situation, but it's irrelevant for this discussion.

As for me, I definitely would. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it would lead into some unhealthy changes in the industry, and I'm not sure if the new VNs would be as appealing to me as the old ones. Nobody really mentions it, but for me one of the main advantages VNs have compared to other media is that they are automatically 18+, so they don't have to deal with all this crap like toning down violent scenes and touching extremely controversial topics.

Let's assume that starting from today there is no way, legal or illegal, to get VNs with H-scenes. All previously existing VNs are perfectly censored, and the new ones are all-ages from the start. Would you still continue reading them after that?

Crime and Punishment is pretty great.

Actually, it was Steins;gate vs Fate, I think. Grisaia lost in semifinals.

And also, I don't think comparing information on polls like that with vndb is going to give information about how experienced people are. I'd personally say, it's the opposite: numbers on VNDB, especially for popular VNs, are mostly defined by people with little VN experience, because there's just much more of them there. I just made a little experiment, and looked through 10 random accounts who gave 10 to Umineko (which sits at #5 in the rating and, honestly, tends to be quite overhyped by its fans, so I chose it), and looked how many votes they have in general. And the results are: Even if we include that some voters played quite a lot of VNs, the median is at 25. Doesn't look very experienced to me. Edit. Actually, I realized that I said not exactly what I wanted to say, so I edited the first sentence. Really, it turned out too wrong.

There is one big difference between VNDB ratings and this poll: on VNDB people cast votes on multiple VNs. And it's a big difference when it comes to statistics. You can also see it that way: between 24 people who voted on this poll so far, 21 didn't vote for Grisaia. VNDB would show what these people think about it. This poll doesn't. Also, recalling some conversations on this forum from a while ago, there are a lot of people here who don't like Grisaia.

Well, considering you ask for favorite VN and not VN I consider the best, I'm going to vote for Umineko. On the other hand, I have three 10s on my vndb (Umineko, Muv-Luv Alternative and SubaHibi) and can't really say 100% which one I like more, because, really, I liked all of them for completely different things. Also, considering Muv Luv also includes Extra, I'm definitely not going to vote for that.

Did you try to look through BIOS settings? I somewhat recall that there were some settings there related to waking a PC from a sleep mode, but I can't say anything more exact, sorry. PS. Though I heavily depends on the model of your laptop, I guess.

Well, I don't really think I've ever read a "proper" moege without inclusion of other genres (and, actually, do they even exist? They at least need to include comedic elements to work, right?) but, yeah, I've read a few VNs with heavy emphasis on moe. As for whether they improved my life in any way... I don't know, but I really doubt it. You see, elements like that are pretty much hit or miss to me. If comedy there is good and characters are still likeable, I definitely might enjoy something like that. I guess, it's not the worst method to lighten your mood. On the other hand, if I'm bored, I will probably end up hating the VN in question.

I don't feel this is even remotely true, honestly. And you forgot about nukige.

Yeah, totally. It actually lowered my opinion about Maeda quite a bit. He is good at writing slice-of-life, comedy and "feels" moments, but when he tries to add actual plot to his stories, he fails.

It's exactly the reason why I was postponing reading it for so long. But you should. It's that good.

So, your thoughts? My choice may seem slightly weird, but I'm going to say Planetarian. Compared to the other works, it's reasonably short, but at the same time it manages to have an interesting and thought-provoking story about the future of humanity, and still gets the "feels" moments right. My second choice would go to Rewrite, even though it's not really a Key VN, in a classical sense.

PS. I'd choose Umineko, but Battler is too moe.