tymmur

First you complain about too big boobs, next you complain about looking old. Are you sure you are looking for MILFs? Sounds more like loli to me

Confession: I once had problems falling asleep and went to my doctor. He gave me some sleeping pills, which were intended to make me fall asleep on command, hence teaching my body to fall asleep at a specific time even after not taking the pills anymore. I took the first one and then the room started to spin and I got attacked by a serious case of nausea. This feeling of close to vomiting kept me awake until the pill wore off and I could sleep... around sunrise. That's the only time I ever took a sleeping pill.
Nice video btw. What it says actually gets the job done and helps sleeping, but I already knew all the tips from other sources.

Confession: Okay, so I managed to get my learner's permit yesterday with 40/48 questions answered correctly on the test. Holy yikes the test here in Florida was way harder than the one I took for Texas. I was only allowed to get up to 10 questions wrong, so I was getting a little shaky once I got to 6, and the other two I answered incorrectly out of sheer nervousness (at which point I started deep breathing exercises). I almost failed the vision test too, but only because there were a couple letters that were easy to mistake for others. Probably didn't help at all that I haven't had my glasses updated in a few years... Yeah, I guess it was something of a miracle that I even got my permit in the first place, lol. And don't worry, I will update my glasses soon!
In other news, I discovered a cool new way to boost my exercise by reintroducing caffeine back into my daily routine! I had given it up in the past when I was desperate to get my sleep under control because I was so used to drinking it in the afternoon and didn't like the idea of drinking it in the morning (I just didn't feel like it). But eventually the sleep deprivation I've been experiencing has hurt my ability to concentrate on studying due to lack of energy. After watching Doctor Mike's video on sleep, I got the idea to start drinking tea again to see if it could help at all, and it ended up helping me in ways I wasn't expecting it to! It was thanks to that extra energy I from that tea that my performance in both studying and even exercising has improved. It worked so well, in fact, that I went from running on the elliptical for 47 minutes at a moderate pace to 65 minutes at a slightly elevated pace. In fact, I wasn't even tired by the end of it either, so I think I'll try running that with a little more resistance tomorrow. Studying has also been a little more tolerable, though I'm still having issues concentrating for longer than 20 minutes.  Maybe I should take up meditation or something.

Those are some pretty interesting points you all made.
Regarding sexual content - just as Lunaterra wrote - I like my games having sex in them. The only difference is, I truly enjoy it when it's meaningful, instead of being devalued to exaggerated fanservice sex romps; many vns treat erotic content like some sort of wish fulfilment for their players to indulge in, not to mention sex rarely works like that in real life. Outside the scope of sex as drama (NTR, arranged marriages, rape) and reproduction, sex is something we do to comfort ourselves. It's selfish - indeed - but there's nothing wrong in demanding love from people who want to share it with you. You take it in and want to repay for their kindness in return. This is what relationships are about. Very few games reach that sort of character development and I really hate when likeable characters are suddenly forced into a pointless sex scene by their creators, just because medium demands it. It's the most grave sin any writer could make.
VNs need to stop being porn on purpose, if they want to achieve something more, otherwise they will never crawl out of the hellhole they're stuck in.
Regarding lolicon, I presume it's quite similar as with porn. Writers need to stop treating lolita characters as walking fetish fuel dispensers. Younger characters can sometimes give a completely different outlook on many elements within a story from their perspective. In the end, it obviously depends on the writers themselves, but ultimately - if a character exists only for the porn, you're getting nowhere, unless it's a porn game you wanted to create.
By all means - I'm not saying to stop creating nukige games, as they have their own place as well. What I'm saying is that all devs - but especially western ones - should start trying harder, because I'm certain they are capable of that. We can truly create immersive, story-driven vns. It's just a pity so many creators end up falling into this niche they dug up under themselves.

Sounds right at first glance, but it's a slippery slope. Next the stories are too long, then it's lack of minigames. Eventually it will be something, which might be more popular, but will they still be VNs? Sounds like you want to take the path of sacrificing the existing VN readers in order to maybe gain new ones.
I was thinking something like that, but more like adult stuff like an all age title and storyline like a pure nukige.

Niché interests (which means damn near all interests) always gets this topic for some stupid reason, don't U understand that the mainstream is not desirable? I don't want to share my hobby with some of you people, because your end goal is to eliminate stuff that I like for the sake of popularity, you want to "drop the porn" and "drop lolicon", screw you, screw your "diversity", screw your ideals of ruining it for others. Freedom of choice should always win, and that's why the mainstream is not desirable to fans; it's incompatible with Japanese VNs. This does not stop you from reading, creating or promoting the VNs you like. The nature of what the medium is does not change just because a lot of Japanese VNs have porn in them. Go your own way and don't drag others down with you, please.

The biggest one: We need to stop treating VNs like they're Video Games Lite. I think we're all guilty of this (myself included), but by doing so, we're effectively limiting VNs' potential reader base to just gamers.
An assumption I see often is that gameplay VNs like Ace Attorney or Danganronpa are inherently more newbie-friendly than normal VNs or especially kinetic novels. This only makes sense if you're assuming that you're trying to market VNs to gamers. I'm not saying that it's bad to try to get gamers into VNs, but why should we limit ourselves to that? Why are they the only audience that we're trying to get?
Other groups who might be interested in visual novels:
Regular novel readers. Yes, they still exist. This is such an obvious thing to me (after all, we're trying to promote visual novels) that it almost amazes me that almost nobody considers that people who like to read might be interested in...well, reading. Comics fans, especially fans of indie comics. We're seeing a tiny bit of overlap between indie comics and EVNs already. I read a short yuri VN named Serre by Adrienne Bazir not too long ago that does really nice things with CGs and sprite animations (especially considering she did everything except the music/sound effects). There's also an interactive graphic novel (which I haven't had the opportunity to buy yet) that came out recently named It Will Be Hard that I've seen get a good reception. I don't know if it'd be called a VN per se, but surely it'd be of interest to people who are interested in interactive storytelling? There's a lot of things that our mediums could learn from each other if we bothered to expand outside our normal horizons. People with disabilities who can't/don't want to play "normal" video games. After all, 99% of VNs have no interactivity beyond clicking to advance the text and possibly making choices. This makes them inherently more accessible than 99% of video games. There are some things to keep in consideration (for example, making sure you can access the menu easily; adding screen reader or text-to-speech support for visually-impaired readers; adding an option to use a dyslexic-friendly font like OpenDyslexic), but overall, making a VN accessible is much easier than making your average video game accessible. More things that would help VNs' reputation and encourage people to check out the medium:
Stop pretending that porn is a necessary component to VNs. I'm not saying "drop the porn" (that'd be hypocritical of me, since I've wished for more 18+ otome in the past), but it's off-putting to a lot of people, and a lot of time it's shoehorned in anyway. Sex in VNs should be treated the same way as it is in books: some books have sex in them, in some books (erotica) sex is the whole point, but you don't need to have sex in a novel for it to be considered literature, nor does having a sex scene in it automatically disqualify a book from being literature. Longer is not always better. I personally like long stories, but a lot of people just don't have the time (or, yes, attention span) for a 50-hour epic. There's value in shorter VNs that tell a good story not just despite, but because of their length...similarly, by holding longer works up on a pedestal, we're encouraging creators to add pointless shit to pad the length of their stories, which just wastes everyone's time. We need to support diverse VNs by diverse creators. Diverse settings, diverse characters, diverse plots, diverse artwork. Basically have something for everyone. There's nothing wrong with high school stories, but it's boring when it seems like that's the only setting that people will read. Part of this is supporting EVNs and EVN creators, who may not have the budgets that the big Japanese eroge creators do, but who are still doing cool stuff. (There's this weird perception that EVNs try too hard to be like JVNs and are all set in Japanese high schools, which hasn't been the case for years? Katawa Shoujo and DDLC aren't representative of the EVN scene as a whole, for a lot of reasons. I will say that there's a disproportionately high number of anime-style EVNs, but even then there  are  plenty  of  exceptions. That's just the first few I found when going through my VNDB collection.) I think the reaction to this year's AX announcements really shows how much pushback there can be against stories that don't fit into the mold of "normal" eroge: JAST USA announced three BL VNs, and MangaGamer announced one BL and one yuri VN, and people are complaining about this year's AX being "overly gay," or about how MG has supposedly "abandoned" the "traditional eroge audience" (never mind that they also announced two Rance games and already have plenty of "normal" eroge in the pipeline) and is now a "fujoshi paradise." I understand the appeal of self-inserting, but some of my favorite stories have been about people very different from me--in fact, a fully-fleshed character who's very different from me can be easier to relate to than a blank-slate protagonist. Basically, if I can read through VNs with straight male protagonists and manage to enjoy them, a straight guy can read through an otome or BL game without...dying, or whatever you think will happen if you touch something not aimed at straight men. Don't promote lolicon/shotacon stuff. This creeps out the vast majority of people, myself included. Maitetsu was a mistake. Just because it's legal (in the US) doesn't mean we have to support it.

Try reading Denpasoft's description. There is a single line, which has a bigger font. I will add it here to make it even easier to read.
If you buy a VN with a description like that and then flame the VN because you expected the protagonist to be attacked by zombies, then you might as well buy an all age VN and flame it for lack of H scenes. Half of the review flames the VN because it contains what it says it will contain rather than what you assumed it to contain. The other half is calling the protagonist abusive. That's more or less what I get from it because the rest are references to the story, which I don't get because I haven't read the VN yet.
Score for the review: 1 / 10
Score for the VN itself: still unknown

I agree with this statement and it's something I have been wondering about every single time this topic is asked. Why would I personally want VNs to be popular? I still don't have an answer, meaning most likely I'm not really that interested in VN popularity.
A worst case scenario is activists resulting in a ban. It's not like activists haven't got a history of resorting to lying to reach their goal. Take for instance the activists attacking Lego. They proclaimed how bad it is for animals with oil spills and their solution to the problem is to get rid of oil companies. The way to do that would be to attack companies with contracts with oil companies because if people stop buying oil, the problem is solved. They went into Legoland and poured oil on some Lego houses, which then went into water and ground etc, but remember it was for a good cause. Lego stated that they have the contract to get non-toxic plastic and the world market can't deliver the amount they need, which is why they have a long term contract with an oil company (remember plastic is made out of oil). The activists didn't care and had a victory when the contract was canceled. Delivering toxic toys to children. It must be a dream come true for activists. They really made a difference. Lego however made a new contract with a different oil company, but that was apparently ok for the activists. They were fighting to get the contract canceled and they won. So what if nothing changed regarding oil.
I dare not to think about what people with a mindset like that would say about VNs. There are quite a lot of activists where facts and goals doesn't really matter. It's mainly about a crusade against some great evil and it doesn't matter if their claim is right or not. Remember when Go Go Nippon went on Steam Greenlight, one of the very first comments was "this must be one of those Japanese rape games" and then a bunch of comments followed about people flaming Steam for allowing something, which promotes rape. All age rape title... go figure. As I said: facts doesn't matter.
 
Another reason why I'm not to keen on getting VNs too big in the west is that once a market becomes big, big companies moves in and change everything. It will end up as TV: bland, the end user should be entertained with mindless stuff and don't think and it has to be political correct. In other words VNs could very well end up being what I try to avoid by picking VNs.
 
What would happen for me if VNs make it big? More titles? Perhaps, but to be completely honest my backlog of unread VNs grow as it is. I wouldn't benefit from more titles. Better titles? I just wrote releases would likely drop in quality, not increase. More popular might be good for publishers, but I'm not sure it's good for me personally.
 
And let's not forget VNs aren't big in Japan. Bigger than in the west, but it's still a niche, which never was and likely never will be big.

The clear winner is the end user. So many announcements, a number of titles for different tastes etc. We did nothing and yet we gain access to this treasure chest.

Agreed. People want instant entertainment and a win here and now. We see a move from movies and certain computer game genres towards casual gaming on mobile devices. A game like StarCraft 2 is no longer as popular as it once was. It shifted towards games like League of Legends. At first glance something of the same nature, but it's fast phased and games ends quickly. You aren't stuck on the same map for hours and you don't save and return the next day. This move towards short and fast interactive entertainment means people click fast rather than stop and think. Visual Novels are the polar opposite. Nothing happens. It takes days to complete and you have to remember what happened to fully understand what goes on later in the story and well written stories will force you to stop and just think about the story without progressing.
Apart from having missed the chance to be big (if it ever existed), I would say the genre is doing better than it used to. It has more mainstream awareness compared to just a few years ago. It used to be something obscure nobody heard about, yet now they are on steam and at least it has public awareness. A lot of people might not like VNs, but at least now millions of people will have an idea of what it is when you mention "Visual Novel". Steam recently made an announcement of policy change and visual novels were mentioned explicitly. Also VNs shows up in places you don't expect, like here (talking about new steam policy):
In other words the public awareness is much bigger than ever before. Availability is like never before because now shops let's you download and the titles will never go out of stock. Multiple stores carries VNs (steam being the dominant one in the public eye). VNs will never be big like FPS or MMO, but relative to what VNs used to be, right now seems like much more public exposure than even the wildest dreams 5-10 years ago.

Is that a hint that I'm writing too much

The clear winner is the end user. So many announcements, a number of titles for different tastes etc. We did nothing and yet we gain access to this treasure chest.

The clear winner is the end user. So many announcements, a number of titles for different tastes etc. We did nothing and yet we gain access to this treasure chest.

Mystery solved. VNDB added him to Rance X yesterday. I was right that he wasn't listed with an obvious candidate for the next release. Had he been listed, then we might have had a chance of predicting Rance X being announced. Once again it makes so much sense in retrospect, but not before you have seen the ending.
Rance IV -Legacy of the Sect-
Rance 4.1 -Save the Medicine Plant!-
Rance 4.2 -Angel Army-
Kichikuou Rance
All those have fan translations though. Only the remakes of 01-02-03 lacks translations or announcements of translations.
Short is an understatement. Rance 1 came on 4 floppies in 1989 and it's apparently 1.5 MB compressed. Most likely they used DD disks, giving it a total of 2.8 MB available. That is for everything: script, graphics, audio etc. For comparison a few posts back it's mentioned that Rance X use 8 MB for the script alone. Even though the remakes are claimed to have 10 times as much text as the originals, translating those would likely feel nearly instant compared to Rance X.
If I am to take a guess to why Rance X is announced and not the early titles, the reason would be that they know Rance X will take ages (years) to translate. If they stop Rance releases while translating, the Rance hype might die out before they finish. Right now they announced it, they have 3 announced, yet not released, 3 remakes and 4 old titles without remakes, making it a total of 10 unreleased Rance titles. This allows them to release a Rance title every 10th of the Rance X translation time, which will make it seem like a steady stream of "new" titles and Rance will have a better chance of still being hype when Rance X is released. The fact that a number of those titles aren't marathon readings just makes it easier to do them in parallel with Rance X.
Somebody mentioned something of a possible remake of Rance 4 (could be a fake rumor for all I know). If that is true and one will be released in Japan at some point in a not too distant future, it's entirely possible that Alicesoft and MG plan together and MG will release 01-02-03-04 within reasonable time of each other. If that's the case, it's possible that MG is translating the remakes now, but can't announce it until the 04 remake is released in Japan or something like that.
We can speculate all we want. The only thing we can really do is to wait for MG to do their job and we will likely get every single Rance title. It's just a question of when and which order.
I don't really get the "who won AX". I don't think that much about publishers. I think in terms of individual titles and for the most part, it's one title from each publisher (if any). I consider AX itself to be the winner. I remember being disappointed with Anime Boston since I'm not really interested in anything released there. I have a completely different feeling with AX. I can't say I saw major surprises though. More Rance announcements, but it was to be expected, particularly with a guest from Alicesoft. As I wrote on page one, we kind of knew the announcement from an old partner would be Alicesoft and most likely Rance. The question was which specific title. Majo Koi Nikki is another one to look forward to and while I was a bit surprised that Denpasoft announced it with them as publisher, it is a title we all knew as an upcoming release.
In other words no big surprises regarding great titles coming out of nowhere, but at the same time it is likely the release event that I'm the most happy with out of all the events I have paid attention to while they were in progress.

Yes, the argument being that even if the script were 10 times the size of the original, it would still seems small compared to Rance X.
 

Holy shit, are people here for real with devaluation of the last good bits this game has, lol.
Lose makes lolige, but they try to keep it reasonably down to earth and emotional for most of the part, where it matters.
If you want porn and dirty talking, go play Little Bitch Girls in Hog Farm.

Mangagamer's panel is starting, and I'll list their three announcement at this post here.
Edit - Now that they finished their announcements, here's the list of the announced VNs. I'll comment more on this later.
Announcement 1 - Luckydog1

Gian Carlo (also known as the "Lucky Dog") and 4 other members of mafia group called CR-5 are locked in prison. One day, they all receive letters from their boss, stating that if Gian successfully breaks all five of them out of the prison, he will become the boss of the CR-5. The group decides to give it a try.
Announcement 2 - Lilcycle

This first all-ages title by PARTICLE is based on a series of yuri drama CDs. The main characters are new idol Yuuno, student teacher Tamaki, and hall monitor and ninja Saeka. The story is focused on their triangle relationship, although the other 12 girls from the drama CDs will also show up, sometimes with surprising pairings. Instead of a single protagonist, the player can switch the viewpoint among the girls.
Announcement 3 - Rance IX

The Helman Empire is the oldest of the countries on the continent, as well as being the most powerful for a long time. However, corruption had ruined the nation and most live in extreme poverty. It felt like it was only a matter of time before an internal revolt would break out or they would be invaded by a neighbouring country. Then the former Prince Patton Misnarge, who had disappeared after failing to conquer a neighbouring country, returned after training hard to keep his promise of bringing back glory to his country. To aid in his revolution, he recruited the best and most courageous men that he had met during his travels, including the most powerful warrior Rance.
PS - All description was taken from VNDB page of the respective VNs.
PPS - Nevermind, they decided to add the additional very good announcement here, so here's their additional announcement here.
Bonus Announcement - Rance X

For over a thousand years, the Continent has been divided into two sides: the Monster Realm, home of the all-powerful Dark Lords and the monster hoards that they command, and the Human Realm, home of humankind and its kin.

In the year LP0007, the forces of the monster army suddenly invade the Human Realm, striking with both overwhelming strength and ferocity.

The civil war between Dark Lords, which had been locked in a stalemate for several years, had finally ended. Its victor, the Dark Lord Kayblis, was declared ruler of all of monsterkind.

His first decree was to take back the human territories using all of the forces at his disposal.

While the major human nations of the world attempt to fight off the invading threat, the immense power difference between their armies and the united monster army quickly becomes clear.

Humanity's strength steadily begins to waver in the face of the seemingly unstoppable foe.

The Human Realm's major world leaders hold a summit to discuss a means of combating the monsters, but are unable to reach an agreement between each other.

Just as all hope seems lost, the man known as Rance stands up:

"All of you just follow me, okay? I'll smash-up all the monster armies no problem!"

While the summit's attendees are understandably shaken by this bold declaration, they quickly accept it.

The Kingdom of Leazas' Queen Lia Parapara Leazas.
The Magic Kingdom of Zeth's Viceroy Magic the Gandhi.
The Helman Republic's President Sheila Helman.
The Free Cities Alliance's representative Copandon Dott.
The eastern nation of JAPAN's ruler Oda Kou.
The world's largest religion the AL Church's Pope Crook Mofus.

It is because of these six women, who have each witnessed Rance's heroism save the world from crisis firsthand, that the agreement is reached.

Under Rance, humanity is united as one.

Thus, the great war to determine the future of the Continent begins. 

Agreed. People want instant entertainment and a win here and now. We see a move from movies and certain computer game genres towards casual gaming on mobile devices. A game like StarCraft 2 is no longer as popular as it once was. It shifted towards games like League of Legends. At first glance something of the same nature, but it's fast phased and games ends quickly. You aren't stuck on the same map for hours and you don't save and return the next day. This move towards short and fast interactive entertainment means people click fast rather than stop and think. Visual Novels are the polar opposite. Nothing happens. It takes days to complete and you have to remember what happened to fully understand what goes on later in the story and well written stories will force you to stop and just think about the story without progressing.
Apart from having missed the chance to be big (if it ever existed), I would say the genre is doing better than it used to. It has more mainstream awareness compared to just a few years ago. It used to be something obscure nobody heard about, yet now they are on steam and at least it has public awareness. A lot of people might not like VNs, but at least now millions of people will have an idea of what it is when you mention "Visual Novel". Steam recently made an announcement of policy change and visual novels were mentioned explicitly. Also VNs shows up in places you don't expect, like here (talking about new steam policy):
In other words the public awareness is much bigger than ever before. Availability is like never before because now shops let's you download and the titles will never go out of stock. Multiple stores carries VNs (steam being the dominant one in the public eye). VNs will never be big like FPS or MMO, but relative to what VNs used to be, right now seems like much more public exposure than even the wildest dreams 5-10 years ago.

Update 1.2, now with more tiddy! Maitetsu 18+ Restoration Patch 1.2

That post made me realize my post about rainbow could be read in an unintended way

Just a reminder that there's a discussion thread.