Dreamysyu

Yeah, it's really dumb. They made the whole thing overly complicated, and just straight up lied about what the patch would actually be. (We thought we'd be getting AA with 18+ scenes, and simply just got plain old Acta instead. Good job, Light.)

I'll come clean right away. I don't particularly like anime, I don't have any special interest in Japan or Japanese culture, and I'm the kind of guy that patches his 18+ games to the all-ages version. Some of my mates call me a "normie", even though I'm still not sure what that even means.
Before you grab your pitchforks and send me on a one-way trip to the Shadow Realm, let me tell you what I do love: visual novels. I love the Kara no Shoujo series, STEINS;GATE, World End Economica, anything with a narrative focus really. Even if some of Kara no Shoujo's 18+ scenes made me want to get a lobotomy to forget I ever witnessed it. Feel free to recommend me your favourite one, I'd love to check it out!
Anyway, I've followed a couple of blogs on this site for a while (Fred the Barber and that Darbury fellow are both hilarious and enlightening) so I thought I'd check out the forums too to get to know all of you lovely people. Looking forward to it! 
 
 

Steamspy has come a long way from its beginnings.
The margin of error now is shown on the site, so you know around how many units the game might have sold.
Thats enough for the purposes we are want here, both their new VN and Ghostlight's new game, Omega Quintet, have had very crappy revenue due to poor publisher reputation.
A Sky Full of Stars sold about 1.345 + or - 1.300 units on Steam, thats a pathetic number, considering even Princess Evangile's fandisc sold about about 1700 + or - 1200 on its first week.
Again, thats a new game versus a fandisc, with the fandisc costing more than double the price.
 
If My Heart Had Wings only sold as much as it did because it was one of the FIRST VNs on Steam + cheap price, alot of people jumped on it back then.

Well, at least they answered you. That's already a progress.

Well, I could do a thread later talking about my experience, as definetly, a LOT changed after all these years. To be exact, I read Umineko in 2013, and as some know, Visual Novels are the genre I'm working in my final College papers, so yeah.
About Umineko itself, I'm still on Episode 3, and I'm doing a lot of research to complement my reading about the characters, the setting and all. To be fair, knowing what I have to go through yet, I'll not comment a lot on this, but I still believe, without bias, that Umineko is one of the best stories I have found in the genre. There are many exceptional VNs, but this is very different in comparison to others.
On the technical part, it bothers me A LOT to not have all the features recent games have, such as volume settings, textboxes, it has very limited text speed, no way to change the font, very few CGs, etc etc.
On the narration, someone already pointed once that this is Ryukishi's problem, but the change of perspective in the game is terrible to follow. Once you get used to Battler, you get a "neutral" narrator, then other characters start doing it, and you don't know what to take as biased or not. For example, many people think Battler is unreliable as a narrator, though many scenes start from his point of view then change completely, which makes you wonder what is reliable and what is not.
And on the story itself...... I get and believe the true culprit, but it still makes me wonder sometimes if Ryukishi changed his mind after episode 2 was released, since many "plot points" were only introduced very late in the story, and even though some got the Epitaph right, or even the culprit, I believe it is impossible to get a lot of the game in the beginning, and ever since Ange is introduced, I think much of it was not as one may have expected in the first episodes.
Again, it is not completely fair to review it now, so I will only get to specifics when I finish it, probably in January. There are many things that I believe are relevant to talk about, and I constantly think of questions that probably will never be answered, so I'd love to have a discussion around them.

Play the reality Nua version of Fate NOT the android version.
It is not something so simple as character routes. It's almost secondary. The Fate route does a lot of word building. It definitely isn't the best, but is something that should not be skipped. While it does deal with the relationship with saber, romance is completely secondary.
UBW anime, overlooked 80% of the route. It's not good on its own, the only reason I watched it was to see my favorite characters in beautiful ufotable animation.
Heaven's feel is probably the best route, at least it was my favorite. If you do plan on playing it, please do not watch the movies first.
Fate was made chronologically, Fate->UBW->HF. You were not allowed to skip routes or deviate from this order. This was done for a reason. Many concepts introduced in later routes rely on understanding from previous routes. Events that happen in HF, are a lot more effective and comparisons and contrasts between the shirou of this route and the shirou of the UBW route can be made. This impacts your experience greatly.
Having watched the anime, which almost feels like a string of badly executed spoilers, it will impact your experience of the first 2 routes, however enough has been overlooked or changed, that you will probably enjoy the VN regardless. And heaven's feel alone makes it worth it.
Play this rather than rewrite because, rewrite+ will come out sometime next year, with better translation/additional routes and content, so wait for that. Also, the chuuni may be a nice change of pace from what you have been reading so far. (slice-of-lifey drama's)
@Narcosis The sex in fate is very,very bad. The writer himself didn't want to write the sex scenes. In later games like ataraxia, some one else was hired to write them, and they were at least decent. There wasn't enough sex in fate that you could define it by the h-content though.

It makes sense, but:
There are better ways to check if a person bought the game or not. If it's really that they were going for, then it's still possible to buy only one DLC, apply the patch and play the game for a halved price.

Debut work by teen creators smashes crowdfunding goal in less than two hours, aims to be better than made-by-adults titles.
A huge proportion of Japan’s romance video games take place in a high school setting, which ostensibly is to help them feel relatable to teen gamers and nostalgic to older fans. But even if the majority of the industry’s characters are teenagers, the people making the games, of course, are adults.
But one noticeable exception is upcoming PC indie game Borderline of the Heaven. The game is being developed by Noer Works, a creative club at Tokyo’s Azabu Gakuen middle and high schools.
Noer Works describes itself with:
“Our members are boys who aren’t popular during puberty. We have put the romance we wanted to experience into this romance game. We want to be popular, but have no chance to do so, and we dedicate our youth to romance games.”
The group seems to have plenty of talent and passion for the medium, but what they don’t have is access to traditional adult-oriented financing. So to help get Borderline of the Heaven made, they launched a crowdfunding campaign on Japanese website Campfire, hoping to raise 300,000 yen (US$2,680). They reached that goal in roughly one hour, and have been blowing past stretch goals ever since.
Despite the self-introduction’s reference to “boys,” there are two female members of Noer Works, who’re shown on Borderline of the Heaven’s crowdfunding page

Noer Works’ members are all fans of romance games, but they have a shared complaint about recent releases in the genre: romance games made by adults don’t feel like they really capture the emotional quality of teen romance, Noer Works asserts. 
“We, who are right in the midst of puberty, are best equipped to make a romance game!” the group boldly proclaims.
Borderline of the Heaven is centered on protagonist Haruto, a highschooler who, because of a bad experience in the past, doesn’t like getting too close to others, except for his childhood friend Kotone and buddy Take (Take being the only male character for whom any artwork has been shown).
Kotone (left) and Take (right)

But after a chance encounter with his similarly withdrawn classmate Ciel outside the town church, Haruto finds a connection forming between himself and the blond, twintailed girl.

Borderline of the Heaven’s crowdfunding campaign is still ongoing. Reward tiers including a physical copy of the game starting at 3,000 yen, and Noer Works says that since it’s not a for-profit group, it has set pricing on its reward tiers to align as closely as possible with production costs.
Noer Works even seems to be taking the international market into consideration. Its Campfire page includes a notice, in English, that “International shipping is available. Please send us an e-mail for more information.” So if you’d like to support the project, regardless of where you are in the world, the Borderline of the Heavencrowdfunding page can be found here.
official website: http://noelworks.net 
source: SoreNews24
 

If so, you may try picking FSN. Imo, both of these VNs have good stories, but they take quite long to get to. If you are fine with spending 10-20 hours on pure comedy and slice-of-life to get to more story-focused parts after that, then picking Rewrite works. (Edit. You aren't, I should've read the first post more attentively.) I personally liked that comedy, but I've also seen some people saying they hated it, so it depends. FSN's SOL scenes, on the other hand, are kind of more evenly spread, but again, the first route you play, Fate, is basically SOL, interrupted from time to time by a battle scene or two. Fate route does have a good story, but it's a general opinion that FSN gets much better at UBW (or even at the second half of UBW).
As for the common routes of Rewrite and Grisaia, I didn't really compare them in length, but I think they are more or less similar. On the other hand, in Rewrite it's already decided by the middle of the common route which girl you are going to end up with, and the later scenes are heavily altered depending on that, so you can say it's actually shorter.
PS. Oh, I missed that you are going to skip Fate. Actually, I am not sure if I recommend to do it, since FSN is designed to be a linear experience and it's best when experienced as such, but since you already have some experience with the story, then I guess it works, probably. UBW anime, I think, adapts the story of UBW more or less faithfully, so you can try it, and if you're bored, switch to Heaven's Feel. Note however that it has much slower pacing and much less fight scenes, but it's my personal favorite of FSN routes.

I agree with Narcosis. Both of these VNs have quite a lot of SOL scenes. Rewrite is basically SOL in the common route, with little hints that something "grand" might be happening behind the scenes. And the common route in really long, comparing in length with Grisaia's common route, I think. FSN has a lot of SOL scenes, to the point that they actually get pretty boring at some points. And they continue throughout the whole story, excluding maybe the second half of UBW and the final third of Heaven's feel. Honestly, if you're tired of slice of live, I can't recommend either of these.

And all of them are equally laughable cringy.  There's this one too, it's a game about a girl finding bombs in tons of weird places so she goes around diffusing them. It's not a VN but it makes even less sense than the others!
 

As it turned out in the end, the thing they released today is a patch that adds the h-scenes to the Steam version but deletes the additional scenes. And yes, you need to play both versions to get the full experience, though apparently the h-scenes aren't very important, depending on who you ask.
Also, I don't think it's released for anyone but backers yet.

I have a review copy and have been playing it for several days, though not very actively. I am still early in the common route (encountered no choices so far).
Some thoughts about what I've read so far:
The script contains occasional bits of sexual humor. A woman sending the protagonist a picture of her cleavage to cheer him up hasn't been altered. This is something that would have been changed in IMHHW. I don't yet know if stuff like bath scenes have been changed, if more explicit sexual talk is changed, or how the lead-ins to h-scenes and stuff are handled.
The translation so far is considerably better than IMHHW. For the common route at least, it feels like a native English speaker actually touched these scripts at some point in the process. There are still occasional grammar errors and the prose is pretty sloppy.
I expect a large level of inconsistency from a Moenovel game this big, so other parts of the game may be considerably worse (or better). As of now though, I'd say this translation is a little below average based on what we typically see from official releases.

After 2 years learning Japanese you most certainly already know that it takes a lot of motivation to stick with it, so I honestly woud opt for the one that appeal to you the most, otherwise it's likely that you give in halfway through and end up losing your time. 
 

If you haven't played Higurashi yet you're morally and legally obligated to buy the $10 tier. Shit's really good

So, I agree with all the points above (TBH, there's too many VNs with Asian themes, doing anything else is the best way to make your product stand out), but one thing that I've noticed is that the whole project, as you described it here, sounds very ambitious and could require a large budget/long production time. Considering that a VN is mostly composed of dialogue, high-quality voice acting can become both a huge drain on resources and a technical limitation - it basically motivates you to keep the story shorter and avoid introducing additional characters, as every bit of complexity adds serious burden to the production process. If you add extra graphical effects and stuff like that to the mix, it starts to sound like a mainstream Japanese project and those are mostly made by large, well-funded studios.
So, while VN might look like a very straightforward and simple format, you should be careful to not underestimate the money and work required for producing a decent-quality one. Especially with voice-acting, for a small western studio I would more or less advice against using it, unless you're 100% sure you can do it right - "silent" characters are still more bearable than poorly voiced ones. 

Look, I'd prefer if VNs finally took off from the high school setting and offered us MILFs and characters in their 20s, 30s, and so on, with more varied settings and cooler stories. It seems pretty stupid to me that most VNs are aimed to an adult public and still depict teenage characters, I understand that for shounen because that's the demographic, but not this.
I know of nukige (huh) with children about 8-10 but I've not played them.
I know there are people that do it at 15-16 but not everyone. Even though the most success I've had is with teenage girls, they're fickle as fuck, I suggest moving away from them entirely. There's an upcoming anime about a high school girl romancing a man in his 40s but I laugh it off, besides, how appropriate and totally not sexist, it's always the girl that's young and the man who's mature.

Using Little Busters! to learn how route systems work is jumping right into the deep end.

18.
(according to the warnings at the start of almost every VN)

That's a common trick, actually.  I haven't actually played FSN myself, but I have no problem believing that's why he's there.

18.
(according to the warnings at the start of almost every VN)

Well, as far as I understand, Main Character is supposed to mean Protagonist here, so I'll stick to them.
I personally never keep lists of favorite protagonists or favorite heroines. I like some characters, dislike some other ones, and am mostly neutral to all the others. When it comes to protagonists, it's also really important for me that they have unique personalities and aren't meant to be generic self-inserts. Without any meaning to the order, here is a list of some protagonists I liked:
Yuuji, Grisaia. Well, I wouldn't call him a really well made character from a critical point of view, but he is one of the rare ones whose thoughts I really liked to follow. And he is pretty cool, I guess. Takeru, Muv Luv series. I don't particularly like him as a person, but I believe that, as a character, he is actually really well made, with all of his motivations having a clear cause and meaning. Another important moment, it's actually scary how much his emotions during Alternative coincided with my own emotions while reading it. Okabe, Steins;Gate. Well, this one is a bit of a fraud on my part, since I only watched the anime and read a few chapters of the VN. But if I actually finished the VN, I would probably put him at #1. Battler, Umineko. I just like this guy. Yuki, Subahibi. It would be pretty cool if she was a protagonist for a full VN, though it wouldn't work in that case.

... aside from Japanese, which I assume every one of us here is pretty fond of 
So I had this idea and thought that could be interesting since from what I can see we are a fairly multicultural community. That should ward off the stereotypes or at least level it out somehow.
So, with your consent, let's get started. 
As a huge language nerd that I am, I cannot for the life of me list all the languages that I happen to like, but let me at least call out some names, soshite, kono forums wa weeb dakara, let's weeb it up a little by providing some animu songs as samples. 
Arabic: I love its sound to bits. So badass yet so beautiful. The grammar is nothing short of amazing, you've gotta love semitic non-concatenative morphology. 
Song
Slavic languages: particularly Czech, Polish and Russian. A lot of palatalization and sibilants, along with monstrous consonant clusters. They sound elegant, rich and complex but also sweet and cute. 
Song Song 2 Song 3
Hungarian: I like slavic, and Hungarian phonology, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have any relation to the slavic family (it's finno-ugric) kinda has a similar touch to it. That aside, I'm a big fan of agglutinating languages with vowel harmony. 
Song
Turkish: have I said that I love agglutinating languages with vowel harmony? Besides, Turkish grammar is incredible, probably the most regular language on Earth. 
Song
Chinese (mandarin) : I'll be honest with you, for the most part of my life, I didn't like chinese at all, nor any tonal languages for that matter. However, due to repetitive exposure and interest in its grammar, little by little I grew to like it quite a bit. Nowadays I find chinese to be a fascinating language with a ton of amazing linguistic features. Don't let the basic appearance of its grammar fool you, chinese is a very complex language at heart. 
Song
German: fairly typical right? Everyone loves German these days. I guess it's the trend right now, probably born due to the number of german bands that started to crop up during this century. Not my case anyway. For me German sounds magical and unique. It's my favorite germanic language along with Icelandic. 
Song
Aaaand I'll stop here. There are a lot more languages that I'd like to talk about, like Welsh and celtic languages, Icelandic,  Swahili, Hawaiian, Nahuatl... But the list would not end and sadly I can't provide weeb stuff of those 
Now it's your turn. Let's see what you guys like, it should prove to be fun and interesting. Also, if you are ok with it, I'd be nice to know what languages you already speak, in order to see how this affects your taste. For the record, my native languages are Catalan and Spanish. 

BTW, I think the absolute world's record is Nekopara Vol. 1, with 9-months-old heroines. Non-human ones, but it only makes it slightly less horrible.
<please don't ban me>

18.
(according to the warnings at the start of almost every VN)