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Templarseeker

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  1. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to MayoeruHitori for a blog entry, Will VNs bring about a revolution in social games? A look at Heaven Burns Red and Tribe Nine.   
    Welcome back to my blog.
    Introduction
    You might have seen a few headlines about Heaven Burns Red and Tribe Nine, two upcoming mobile games from writers Maeda Jun and Kodaka Kazutaka.
    These aren't just your average games. They're ambitious ventures that blur the line between visual novel and social (AKA gacha) game.
    So I'm here today to talk about exactly why VNs fans should pay close attention to the potential of these two upcoming games, given both how unique their stories could turn out to be and  their implications for the VN industry as a whole.
    As an important disclaimer, like almost all social games, these two titles will probably be a bad fit for anyone who has a predisposition to gambling addiction. If you think that label could apply to you, my recommendation is: don't even consider playing them (or any other social game). Just stick with VNs, and watch these games' stories on YouTube or elsewhere later.
    The Worn Soil of the Visual Novel Industry, and Social Game Money Trees
    There's no question that Japanese visual novels have declined relative to their peak. (International VNs are very much on the rise, but that's another subject, and they have yet to reach Japan's heights anyway.) The golden age is far behind us, and there are no more VNs that turn into famous multi-industry franchises. The otaku community as a whole has shifted its interest away from VNs and back to anime and manga, or onward to the likes of isekai novels, doujin eroge, and social games.
    If you can't accept this and want to understand exactly when and why visual novels declined, check out this post's prequel, Notes on the past and hope of Japanese visual novels.
    Back in the heyday of VNs, CEOs of eroge companies were buying sports cars, and there was no lack of investors. When the decline happened, there were a variety of causes/symptoms, but the one that produced the most tremors in the industry is that the cash flow dried up. Somebody moved Baba's cheese. So where did the cheese go, then?
    The best answer is that it went to social games. In fact, the year that the sales decline of eroge leveled out (you might say that people finished evacuating) was the same year that there was a broad movement by the Japanese game industry to take their social games off of SNS and onto independent platforms like GREE to boost profits.
    No social game born from a visual novel IP has drawn more attention than Fate/Grand Order. True, Fate was already a massive franchise even before FGO, and that certainly helped the game succeed financially. However, the all-time revenue from console Fate/stay night is infamously less than a week's worth for FGO. FSN sold less than a million copies on all platforms, but the same core Type-Moon artist, writer, and pair of composers have built the creative foundation of a mobile spin-off with more than a million active users, and vast revenue thanks to whales.
    Bad Stories: An Inevitable Problem with Social Games?
    Visual novels have a reputation for deep and powerful stories. Social games don't, despite the fact that they share so many elements with VNs: they often have an ADV presentation style that's similar to VNs, talents from the VN industry often work on them, the plot can end up quite lengthy and complicated just like VNs, the player meets hero(in)es and builds relationships with them like in VNs, and so on. Instead, what social games have a reputation for is waifus/husbandos and fanservice.
    There's a reason for that reputation: developers' attitudes. As a genre, social games weren't developed with the goal of telling compelling stories; they were created in order to facilitate gameplay that leverages behavioral habits to encourage players' engagement and investment. And while the presence of VN-esque heroines can serve to boost players' engagement, lengthy VN-esque narratives are regarded by social game developers as an impediment to engagement, given the way consumers have trended away from VNs. As a result, social game scenarios are often short, and constrained by the gameplay's predetermined "plot" such as random monster attacks every 2 minutes. They even have silent protagonists, a convention that the story-driven JRPG and VN industries abandoned a long time ago.
    The truth is, developers' disregard for scenario quality actually isn't new at all. Leaders in VN and eroge companies have always had a pattern of naively thinking that the artist is the person who matters most in a VN's development, and that the writer is the person who matters least. In the early days, they would even hire absolutely anyone to be an eroge scenario writer, because they just didn't care. So it's a problem that many decision-makers in these companies are actually idiots whose presence does the social game industry a disservice.
    And so no, bad stories in social games aren't inevitable. In fact, many game development teams recognized their bad stories and belatedly tried to improve them. That's why you will often hear people say of social game stories "the later events at better" or "they didn't think it would be so popular early on..." Unfortunately, a bad story can't truly be fixed by additions to it; it should be at least rewritten, but that rarely happens. So what you have is an industry that's still full of bad stories, and producers who think that's perfectly natural.
    The Ambition to Create Deep Stories in Social Games: Enter Key and Too Kyo
    In December 2019, Key announced Heaven Burns Red. Key needs no introduction; their writer Maeda Jun's nakige Kanon was largely responsible for redefining VNs as emotional experiences in the first place. 1st beat was the last game he had direct involvement in. Pre-registrations are already open, and trailers and interviews have come out which show many indications that Heaven Burns Red has potential:
    The protagonist actually speaks, and forms clear emotional connections with other characters. Without a real protagonist, a social game story's prospects are much lower, because players can't self-insert as well; they wonder why an epic plot revolves around a character who has the expressiveness of an emoticon set. This is one of the major complaints people have toward social games with relatively good stories like Fate/Grand Order. Maeda Jun's humor is as spectacular as ever. Key's writer has once more created a world full of characters who are funny and distinct. Just a few lines spoken between them is enough to entertain or intrigue the player. Good comedy is one of the few things that can instantly grab a person and maintain their attention. Too few social games are actually fun to read early on. Baba, someone whose vision of visual novels' potential aligns with what I've talked about, is fully behind this. Baba Takahiro, a smart businessman who founded and still leads Visual Arts, has shared his views with the world in interviews. He had Key partner with WFS, a competent and experienced developer which has created some of the more story-oriented social games, like Another Eden and Shoumetsu Toshi. He has a realistic awareness that VNs are no longer as popular as they once were, but at the same time, as recognizes and wishes to continue to leverage the potential of VN-style stories to let players form deep attachments to characters. HBR is just one of many projects Baba has approved in order to help Key and its talents adapt to industry trends. You can count on there being nakige elements. This is clear from trailers, if it wasn't already clear from the fact that Baba will naturally leverage Maeda's talents. It's not like other social games haven't made many of their players cry before, via plot elements like tragic backstories and character deaths, but they don't be able to hold a candle to what Maeda can do. The scale is broad, as you'd expect from a social game that's been taken so seriously by its developers. There are already character designs and concepts for 48 main characters, Maeda involved in all of them, beyond the 12 who have been introduced so far. Even just as a social game, the production values and system look better than almost anything I've seen before. The 3D environments and models, special attack animations, character designs, music, and voice acting are all impressive. If you want more of a sense of what Heaven Burns Red is like, I recommend watching the first and second trailers.
    In February 2020, Too Kyo and Akatsuki announced a new social game called Tribe Nine. (For those who don't know, Too Kyo is a collaborative indie company established in 2017 which employs a number of creative talents, such as writer Kodaka Kazutaka the rest of the Danganronpa team, Zero Escape's writer Uchikoshi Koutarou, and Root Double's writer Nakazawa Takumi. They all left their former companies.) Anyway, at the time Tribe Nine was announced, it was a teaser that most people didn't pay much attention to. But in fact, half a year later, Too Kyo secretly went from an LLC to a corporation. Then earlier this year, they put out a call to recruit a number of new writers. While the scale of the changes at Too Kyo isn't clear yet, Nakazawa and Kodaka have described the company's atmosphere as intensely busy and full of enthusiasm.
    The game's storytelling approach comes from Kodaka. Like Baba, he has strong views about the potential of emotionally moving stories to redefine our expectations for game narratives, and he has enough ambition for 3 Babas. The scenario size is already more than the original Danganronpa's, and they plan for it to be more than double that before the game's release. Not that they will release it all at once. Danganronpa was easily a medium-sized VN. Having twice that written before release is unprecedented for a social game. For comparison's sake, the entirety of FGO's Arc 1 (through Solomon) is just comparable to a medium-sized VN that's on the long size, 750K characters. Great value is placed in the writers for Tribe Nine. Look at what I just said about the scenario size; the implication is that Too Kyo will output maybe half a million characters in just the next few months. While it's too early to make any definitive judgments, the implication from recruitment notices and Kodaka's comments about them is that Too Kyo's new writers have been directly enabled to create the kind of stories they want to tell, that they can be passionate about, and fit those stories into the world of Tribe Nine's Neo Tokyo. Both Heaven Burns Red and Tribe Nine are mobile games, with no PC ports or localizations announced yet. But it's clear that both Key and Too Kyo want to release their works in the West, and I believe that WFS (partnered with Key for HBR) is particularly equipped to make that happen, since they also localized Another Eden. Historically, every Too Kyo project has also seen localization, even simultaneously.
    Conclusion: Exploration and Wandering in Search of Forgotten Beauty and Prestige
    Social games are one of the most lucrative genres of video games in existence, thanks largely to whales' wallets, but also due to their popularity among ordinary people. Yet ironically, they are the subject of constant ridicule, and not just for their gambling elements. Even the most popular ones are often criticized as having generic, snoozefest stories and vapid, grindy gameplay.
    But if you look closely, there's a subset of fans who actually rave positively about social games' stories. Stories that are objectively "okay" at best, even if you don't factor in the bad gameplay that accompanies them. And the reason they do that is actually the same reason people might also praise the potential for lengthy VNs to immerse players: the more time players spend with characters, the more they become attached to them.
    When you wake up every day and tap on an app icon and see your waifu say hello on your home screen, take her into battle constantly, watch as new side episodes and versions and skins of her are released multiple times a year, browse tons of fan art, and so on... you become attached to that character, and all her idiosyncrasies. So even if some new event's plot that involves her is bland by any objective measure, it's still directly about someone you're fond of, who you just love to see talk and act--so you enjoy it. Consider a certain tiny dragon who's a generic JRPG mascot character with the catchphrase "I'm not a lizard" voiced by Kugimiya Rie, and who has zero character depth or character development ever... After you've watched 100+ short slice-of-life scenes involving him over the course of 2+ years, he feels like an old friend with a bit of a silly personality, it comforts your heart a little to just be around him, and you'll even create memes about his love of apples to share on Reddit or Discord. That's what it's often like to become a fan of these games, as a cognitive process.
    Long-lived social games are, inherently, epics. They are expansive worlds with vast casts of characters, explored over the course of months and years. And yet, they're even more than that. They're epics where the gameplay is designed to make us feel emotionally engaged with their world, in spite of their poorly written and ambiguously connected stories which only have a few occasional good scenes.
    If social games that follow these two upcoming games' example were to become the norm, I believe we'd have a chance to see a game that is simultaneously objectively great--at the very least, one tier below VNs' top tier--and epic in scale, and viscerally engaging. That kind of intensively integrated experience, which simmers alongside one's daily life, is something that I hope to one day get a taste of.
    But in the meantime, I will have to wait for these creators' attempts to pan out--for them to crack the code that will successfully fuse the charm of both social games and VNs. And so my eyes are on Heaven Burns Red and Tribe Nine.
    Misc. Reference
    It occurred to me that I didn't link to many sources for much of the info I have, so to help remedy that a bit, I've edited in this section to add a few links.
    https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/interview/210930f Tribe Nine, Denfaminico Gamer interview with Kodaka
    https://voice.aktsk.jp/6773/ Tribe Nine, Akatsuki's interview with their producer Yamaguchi
    https://twitter.com/kaibutsukantoku/status/1444452237108039682 Tribe Nine translated info from above 2 articles
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNQNZiy7K2I Tribe Nine game promo movie (no gameplay shown)
    https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/poc3oo/what_we_know_about_heaven_burns_red_so_far/ HBR, good summary of info
    https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/k31fxx/jp_script_size_by_singularity/ Source for FGO numbers
  2. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Clephas for a blog entry, Waga Himegimi ni Eikan o   
    This is the newest game by Minato Soft, the makers of Majikoi.  As per usual, I'll be straight with yall and say that I thought this would end up essentially being a slice-of-life failure like a lot of Minato Soft's non-Majikoi VNs.  However, this game is actually much closer to a chuunige in nature than I anticipated.  In the end, I gave this one of the highest ratings I've given in a long while, but there are some issues, which I'll mention farther along.
    Wagahime's protagonist is a young lad from the frontier called Shaon, the adopted son of the Great Tenken Master Figaro.  Shaon is, personality wise, very much like the harem protagonists you see so often in charage.  However, he does have the will to fight when necessary and the ability to commit to a course of action when needed, so he definitely stands well above that crowd.  At the beginning, Shaon contracts with the Artificial God, Minjara, and gains the power to fight like, well... a god for three minutes every three days, in addition to his pre-existing Tenken, which lets him heal and strengthen others.  He then sets off on a journey to see the world and find a wife, along with his little sister Ebiita and his father's friend Peta (a sapient rabbit-type person).  
    One negative I have to put forth about this VN, though it makes sense considering that the Tenmazoku route is the true one, is that the route order is locked, forcing you to do the Empire and Federation before you can do the Tenmazoku (Krone).  There is no common route.  Instead, there is a storyline for each country, with a single heroine (and a bunch of fake endings with other girls that just consist of H-scenes).  In the case of the Empire, it is the Empress Noa.  In the case of the Federation, it is the proxy PM, Erin; and in the case of the Tenmazoku, it is the Tenmaou (Queen of the Tenma) Krone.  
    Empire
    The Empire route is the most SOL-friendly of the three routes, focusing on Shaon journeying across the empire, then his time in the capital, before the climax of the story.  Due to events early on, Shaon gets his foot in the door and meets Noa in a fashion that is relatively realistic, albeit only within the setting (it requires suspension of disbelief that a 700 year-old Empire would fail to insulate their royals better from the nobility and commoners).  Shaon, given his bond with Minjara, of course quickly manages to gain the interest of a number of players in the political game, making his stay there the most complicated of the three, in terms of personal relationships.  
    In many ways, this path justifies the locking of the paths the most.  The drama here would lose most of its impact if you were aware of the events of the Tenmazoku path, and the drama is pretty good.  Action scenes here are very similar to those of Majikoi, albeit often longer-lasting (Momoyo not being there to end things in an instant and most people being on more even terms when it comes to power).  The romance portions are pretty innocent as these things go, though the issue of social status does come up (and is promptly squished).
    The Federation
    The Federation path starts a bit more abruptly than that of the Empire.  The Federation is a nation formed on the old frontiers of the Empire by escaped slaves and dissidents from one of the darker eras of that nation.  It is a nation of numerous races with a system whereby each province selects a governor, who then votes for the PM.  The PM is more of a 'first amongst equals' than a true federalist leader, and the elections are often... lively beforehand.  
    This path is more action-packed from beginning to end than either of the other two paths, for reasons that make perfect sense as part of the story.  Erin, the heroine of this path, is an elf and a politician, through and through.  That is not to say she is black-hearted.  Rather, she is perfectly willing to use every opportunity to gain positive publicity in the course of pursuing the good of her nation.  The protagonist's role here is a bit more specialized (outside of the romance).
    As I said before, this path is more action packed than the other two paths, mostly because Erin is so desperately moving around to get elected as the next PM, which results in her personal subordinates having to deal with a lot more in the way of tribulations on a daily basis.  Romantically, the issues here are predictable to anyone who has read enough high fantasy with relationships between races with different lifespans.  
    Tenmazoku
    The Tenmazoku path's heroine, Krone is a lot like Momoyo (except about five times as powerful) if she didn't have her grandfather to rein her in and everybody around her encouraged her bad habits instead of restraining them.  At the same time, she has the same intensity to everything she does, her affection bringing back memories of Majikoi for me.   Honestly, this was my favorite path (obviously), and it was apparent from the beginning that this was intended to be the true path, at least to me.
    This path is very revealing about a lot of the setting's peculiarities, certain characters' motivations, and a number of other issues.  There are a lot of good action scenes, a lot of familiar comedy routines (to those who played Majikoi), and I honestly liked the parts on Rancage (the Tenmazoku continent) for the sheer contrast to the mainland countries.  That said, I believe this path could have been greatly enhanced if more detail went into the early parts of this path after the arrival at Rancage, because it felt like there was an excessive focus on Krone's obsession with Shaon, lol.
    The last stretch of the story (the romance is pretty much just an evolution from the main part of the path) is pretty much solid drama and action, and while it lacks the sheer impact of something written by Nitroplus or Light, it was still an enjoyable experience.  
    The Negative
    I'm going to be straight here... they set this game up for a Majikoi-style fandisc or discs.  The other 'endings' are simply brief event and h-scenes that cut off abruptly once they've done the deed, which is less than pleasing for me, since I was looking forward to the possibility of actual heroine routes for some of the sub-characters, like Youksha.
    Conclusion
    Overall, if you liked Majikoi and Minato Soft's style, you'll like this game.  If you didn't, there is a good chance you'll have the same issues here.  This game has first-class production values and characters, but if you don't like the style, it might be hard to enjoy.  The issue with the sub-heroines is a seriously annoying one, albeit one that is likely to be solved in a year or four with a fandisc or two.  I gave this game a pretty high rating, and I don't regret it.  I also don't doubt that some people will hate on this game, hard.
  3. Yes
    Templarseeker reacted to littleshogun for a blog entry, Girls' Tale Review - Top 10 Best Rated Visual Novels Translated in 2020   
    Quite a crazy year that we have in regard of 2020, especially with pandemic and all here. Anyway just like previous best rated VNs list I'll list what's translated VNs that we have in 2020 here, and the rules are still the same in that I won't list BL, fandisc (So no Aokana EXTRA1 and Miagete FD), partial translated VNs, censored VNs (None at this year thankfully) and otome VNs. Let's see what kind of VNs that I'll list below, and I'll tell the meaning of the title at PS below. Also I'm sorry if some of your favorite VNs here didn't available in my list, and I know that each of you may think differently on what's the best translated VNs that we have at 2020. For the scoring, it would be based on VNDB average score at December 31st, 2023 and as always both of the score and the rating can be change in the future.
    10. IxSHE Tell (VNDB 6.97)
    Back at 2018 when Nekonyan was established, one of their announcements is Melty Moment in that they'd plan to release it in 2018. Of course there's a lot of unfortunate circumstances that caused Melty Moment to be delayed, and thus Nekonyan decided to have a talk with Hooksoft in regard of the matter with the result that Nekonyan will released newer Hooksoft's VN. So we have Nekonyan licensed IxSHE Tell, and we have this released back at August. The premise is our MC Hajime manage to abolished a century rule that banned romance in the school after his hard work as student council president, and consequently he become very popular so much that the girls want to go out with him. Soon after that, he find himself surrounded between five heroines who obviously want to go out with him as well. Since our Hajime is too busy to think about romance in the past, naturally he's very confused about his new situation so it's up to the player to help her get his love. For the VN itself, it's purely moege with a lot of comedy scenes so don't expect heavy story and instead just enjoy the comedy along with the arts which to say is nice looking.
    9. Sakura no Mori Dreamers (VNDB 7.32)
    I see a lot of critic in regard of Sakuramori here, whether in regard on how the genre (Horror and charage) didn't really mix together or on how the four heroines are really pale in comparison with one heroine that didn't have route for logical reason (Madoka). For the former since the charage portion did happen after the horror portion ended, at least you can treat the charage as the breather after horror portion that took the whole common route. As for the latter, I can only say that it should understandable if one have been play Evangile and it also happen that the writer (Kure) did write one side heroine (Ruriko) is more prominent compared to the four heroines, and obviously Kure did apply his Ruriko writing by making Madoka more prominent. As for the premise, it's about our MC Shinji who's been in grief thanks to a crazy killer did kill his childhood friend Madoka and so he's been in despair. At least until he was invited by a girl (Kureha) in order to help her with fighting the monsters inside the dream in order to protect the city that have the supernatural incidents occur a lot, and so Shinji decided to accept her invitation in order to move on from his loss of Madoka.
    8. Riddle Joker (VNDB 7.63)
    Back at January last year, Nekonyan did announce this along with (Redundant) Dracu Riot, which to say sort of ironic seeing that mod Clephas did say that Riddle Joker here is very similar to Dracu Riot. As for what I can say in regard of that, at least I can say that I recommend anyone else to read Riddle Joker first if you still waiting for Nekonyan to release Dracu Riot. Also both works did have it's own pro and con, so to each of their own in regard on which VN is better. The premise goes like we have Satoru who've been hide the secret that he's a secret agent and then he got the mission to infiltrate the school that educate the students with super power. Along the mission, he met the student council president Ayase who find out Satoru's secret and turned out Ayase also has a big secret, and her secret is she wore the pad to cover the fact that her breast is quite small. As both of them known each other secret, they started to get closer with each other and naturally there'll be romance between them (Of course Satoru can ended up with other girls beside Ayase). Lastly I can say that it's nice that we can see two translated Yuzusoft VNs in a year, and thus now we have five translated Yuzusoft VNs.
    7. Senren Banka (VNDB 7.72)
    At July 2017 in AX Sekai did announce this along with several other announcements, and of course back then I really hoping that Sekai will deliver it. Only to find out that Sekai didn't do anything on Senren Banka for around 17 months until when Nekonyan did announce this, and from there we've started to see some progress on Senren Banka. Time passed, and back at Valentine Nekonyan did release this after they did release the trial beforehand. As for the premise, we have our MC Masaomi visiting his grandfather village in order to helping out the ryokan. Before going to Ryokan, Masaomi did see a tourist attraction in which there's a katana was stuck in the stone and he did try to pull it. Little did he know back then that he'll broke the katana and thus it created the commotion, with the end result that Masaomi must engaged to the shrine maiden as form of responsibilities. While at first Masaomi didn't like it seeing that the village is basically out of nowhere, it didn't take too long before Masaomi took a liking to the village. By the way while the story in common route is interesting, in the end it's still a charage so don't expect some epic story in Senren Banka here.
    6. Robotics Notes (VNDB 7.73)
    Science Adventure VN that is quite unfortunate in that it has been compared with Steins Gate so much that people think it's not good, and the staffs here didn't help at all by released the fandisc that has Steins Gate major characters (Daru) as the second MC which indicate that even the staffs themselves didn't have confidence that Robotics Notes can stand on it's own. As for Robotics Notes itself, we have our MC Kaito who's been childhood friend with Akiho. One day in order to avoid the disband of Robot club, Akiho decided to make a big accomplishment by building a giant robot, and of course she decided to enlist Kaito's help who at first is not quite enthusiastic. Some times after that Kaito find some files called Kimijima Report, and the report did contain a plot that involving the whole world which of course would lead into something big as per Science Adventure VN. Curious about the report, Kaito decided to investigate it while at the same time he gather more allies to help Akiho build the robot. The PC version at first didn't have mouse control support which to say is a questionable decision, but thanks to Committee of Zero who released the improvement patch now we can play this using mouse.
    5. Making Lovers (VNDB 7.82)
    Another Smee VN, and it's the 2nd Smee VN that Nekonyan localized after Fureraba. Since it came from same company along with have same writer, Makeover here also has comedy writing like Fureraba and of course Makeover here is just usual moege. As for the premise, we have Kazuma who is a young adult and live alone. Obviously this time the MC here is not a high school student, but instead Kazuma here is already graduated from the college. Even so, the problem is still the same though in that he want to have a girlfriend. In Makeover here we supposed to help Kazuma to get his girlfriend, although this time instead of small talk like at Fureraba you can just chose the heroines by using the choice like usual VN and there's no much choices so you can immediately make Kazuma to have his girlfriend. As for the girlfriend candidates (ie heroines), this time we have five with the candidates are a tsundere former college friend, a high school model, a stepsister, a weather forecast presenter, and a strange neighbor. Nekonyan also plan to localize the FD of this, although as of now there's still no work on the FD because they've been quite busy with handling many other projects.
    4. Ryuusei World Actor aka Meteor World Actor (VNDB 7.84)
    At first Shiravune (Formerly ShiraVN) want to release this on Steam, but for some reason Valve reject it for three time so that we can't see Steam release for it. After the repeated rejections, Shiravune decided to release it on Johren in which it's their own store (Both of Shiravune and Johren are owned by DMM). For the premise, we have our MC Ruka who work as a policeman and that he's been quite infamous within the forces. One day he got a female elf newbie named Claris, and Ruka guide Claris begrudgingly because he was forced to do that by his superior. Other thing to note is that it's first Kinugasa translated work in that it show he can write good comedy along with good setting in which the other races live together with human (One of those is the aforementioned elf), while at the same time he can't write an ending to his own story because he spent too much time on establishing the setting or to put it nicely he prefer to write open ending that some people may like it. I know currently the sequel is in development according to this tweet, but seeing that Kinugasa still wrote open ending even at Akagoei 3 I don't think that Kinugasa won't write the open ending in the sequel.
    3. Gekkou no Carnevale (VNDB 7.86)
    I must say that I'm quite surprised with this, especially I did know about this three days after the release (The release day was at Christmas). Moreso if I consider that the one who release this was GHS of all people, and naturally people are skeptical about this seeing that his reputation is quite infamous thanks to his (So-called) badly translated Cross Channel. That said even with knowing his past infamy and that the translation of this is apparently not quite well done, I still say that you should read this to either read more Nitroplus VN or check if the translation is really bad as people says. As for the premise of Carnevale, we have Romeo who work as taxi driver and ironically has a bad sense of direction. However, he has a secret in that he's a former member of a mafia and he himself is a werewolf, and that the mafia where he did belong is pursuing him. Along the way, Romeo pick a living doll that didn't have past memories named Anna, and Romeo decided to live together with her. Of course seeing that Romeo did need to fend off his pursuer along with some new enemies, naturally he'll fight some people and thus Carnevale here has fighting scenes.
    2. Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi aka YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story (VNDB 8.02)
    As for Kimikoi, at first I was surprised on why Nitroplus here like to make the VN setting like a usual moege with school and all. At least until one day in which I watch a certain video, and I can say that I like that Nitroplus did go all out step outside their comfort zone by making a lighthearted moege. As for the premise, we have our MC Shinichi who has a childhood friend named Miyuki. One day he find a weird girl named Aoi who like to mutter some nonsense terms such as game, heroine, and the like. Of course Shinichi as normal people would pitying her because it mean that she's not normal so Shinichi decided to enlist Miyuki help. Over time, Shinichi, Miyuki, and Aoi become the best friends and as per moege rule both heroines are fall in love with Shinichi. I see that some people did mention that this VN did resemble Doki Doki Literature Club when they play or review Kimikoi, but I would say that they're totally wrong because there's no literature club in Kimikoi here. I also see some people did compare Miyuki with Monika, but I think they're pretty much different with the only similarities are those their name started with M and both names have six letters.
    1. Summer Pockets (VNDB 8.48)
    The newest KEY work, and it's their big work after Rewrite. As for the VN itself, all of the twists did resemble some of previous KEY VNs twists here and thus it make Summer Pockets quite fit as first KEY VN to play, or perhaps can also be treated as nostalgia for veteran KEY player. As for the translation, at first Alka is the one who handle this, but later Visual Arts decided to localize this and they released this back at February. With Reflection Blue release, Alka decided to work on that and they also decided to reworking the original version translation seeing that they're not satisfied with the official translation. As for the premise, we have Hairi who experienced some unpleasant incident decided to go to the island where his late grandmother did reside in order to recover. From there he'll get introduced with the four girls who one way or another will have the romance with him. Forgot to say that while Summer Pockets twists like KEY past VNs, the main writer here is Niijima Yuu in which it made Summer Pockets as the second work of him that was translated after Majokoi. As for the opening, I'll use the one from the original version because it has nice 2D animation and Reflection Blue keep it anyway.
    That's all for my list this year, and as for my honorable mention I'll name Yuki Koi Melt, Ouka Sabaki, Rhapsody, and Iwaihime. Overall for 2020 I can say that Nekonyan did being aggressive by releasing several interesting title at once, although I guess I can say that Mangagamer is not so bad considering the year that we have here (If anything else I'll look forward to their Musicus release later). Also this year we have Shiravune which as we know is DMM branch, I'll look forward to see what kind of feat that they'll be able to do in the future even though their VNs lineup is not as interesting as Nekonyan yet. To conclude this, I'll look forward to what both of Nekonyan and Shiravune can do later along with some potential interesting releases at 2021 later.
    PS - As for the title, I combined both of the opening song title from both of Makeover (Girls' Carnival) and Summer Pocket (Alkatale), so we have 'Girls' Tale' for the title here
  4. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to bakauchuujin for a blog entry, Picture of all my physical visual novels   
    Here are pictures of all of my physical visual novels.
    Some of these I have already done a review of while the others are planned to at some point get a review once I have read them.
    There are also going to be more visual novels added here in the future. For instance have I backed physical tier of kickstarter for Island, Momoiro Closet and Newrin as well as having pre ordered the complete box for Grisaia.
     
     
    Some of my english visual novels

    More of my english visual novels

     
    Grisaia complete box

    Aokana

    Nekopara vol 4 and Sengoku Rance

     
    My english visual novels with nsfw cover
    English Console VNs

    Japanese visual novels for PC

    More japanese visual novels for PC

    Some more japanese physicals, some of them have NSFW box
    My japanese visual novels for PS Vita

    My japanese visual novels for PS3 and PS4

     
     
  5. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Stellaren II (Western VN Review)   
    Stellaren, released exclusively to mobile devices in 2017 was an important game in my engagement with VNs. A dark sci-fi adventure with a captivating setting and a tense, at times brutal story stood out significantly from most other visual novels available for smartphones and I think to this day is one of the best dedicated Android/iOS games of its kind [you can find my detailed review of it here]. It also cemented my love for VNs as a storytelling formula and while some of that infatuation was definitely connected to me being a fairly inexperienced reader, many elements of Stellaren’s worldbuilding and character development are genuinely bold and interesting – and to the point where I wasn't even bothered by its rough edges and clunky gameplay elements.
                    Because of all this, it is an understatement to say I was excited to hear about the release of Stellaren II July this year, coming out not only for mobile devices but also on Steam. Promising heavily updated visuals, a set of better-polished gameplay elements and a substantial, conclusive story (its predecessors had a tendency to end on cliffhangers), it seemed like a massive treat for someone like myself, already in love with this universe. What I found was both different and more complex than I expected – but did it capture the charm and stomach-gripping qualities of the original?
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  6. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Clephas for a blog entry, JRPG: Growlanser IV   
    The Growlanser series is one of those weird, hardly known jrpg series that died out after the ps2 era (mostly because its gameplay was too traditional, but also because the transition to 2.5D sprites failed so miserably in V and VI, along with the derivative, predictable story).  However, before its death, it produced four first-class games, three of them linked in a single chronology.  IV, also known as Wayfarer of Time, is the exception in the series as a whole, being the only entirely standalone game.
    Growlanser IV's Western release was on the PSP (also playable on the Vita and PSTV) with a modified main route and an 'evil' route that you could access on NG+.  The first four Growlanser games can be said to be very attractive to those who like player agency.  This is because, depending on how you fight, how you play, and what conversation choices you make (three of the four protagonists are silent ones whose) you could not only alter your own perceptions of the main character, but you could also alter the ending and even the game flow as a whole dramatically. 
    Growlanser IV isn't an exception to this, but in a way it is easier.  One reason is that you aren't required to get the highest rating on  all story missions to get access to the 'true' ending.  Rather, it uses a 'fate alteration' system which allows you to take on sidequests, take various actions in combat, and make choices in conversations that alter how the game ends, who lives, and who dies.  The 'Modified Route', which is pretty much the 'good' route, pretty much requires you to alter every possible character's fate in order to create the result of ten major characters still being alive past the turning point of the story and the end.   With some of these characters, it is as simple as saving them in a certain story battle, with others it requires making the right choices in conversations with them in order to change how they act, thus preventing their deaths.
    In this way, I came out of Growlanser IV feeling that, for the first time in a long time, that player agency actually mattered.  Hell, I never thought scolding a girl about throwing things then showing her kindness would give me an opportunity to save her soul later.
    The main story itself is heavy on war politics, much like all the other games in the series.  In this case, it is a war story spread across about four years (my estimate) that ends up involving the whole of the known world.  The protagonist, raised in a mercenary outfit, ends up getting involved with saving the world and the nations in it... but you rarely see him being treated like a 'chosen one' outside of a few of his own companions.  Rather, most reactions are based in that person's standpoint and affiliation, which made both the enemies and allies feel real to me in a way few jrpgs ever manage. 
    This game manages to avoid the traditional pitfalls of the average jrpg.  What do I mean?  I mean that tendency toward hot-blooded idealism and dew-eyed innocence about human nature that ruin 90% of JRPGs storywise.  I mean, a king isn't interested in saving the world... he is interested in enriching his country.  Good people in the wrong position will do bad things, and bad people who can benefit from it will do good things.  The characters feel like people, and I don't feel like I'm talking to carbon copies of characters from a thousand other jrpgs like I do with most mainline jrpgs.
    The battle system in this game is a combination of turn-based and real-time strategy.  Generally speaking, you start out at a certain point of the map, and your characters move in real time when you aren't making choices about their next action.  It is possible to alter their course, and you can block enemies' routes with your warriors' bodies.  Knacks (non-magic activation skills) can be used to strike hard, slow enemies' turns,or slow their chanting of magic.  Magic takes a while to chant, but in exchange you can take normal actions immediately afterward, and spells can be canceled at any time just by pressing the triangle button and going to the character in question.
    Perhaps the game's biggest overt weak point gameplay-wise is the way you learn skills (passives), Knacks (instant-use attack/support/debuff/buffs), and magic.  They are learned by attaching spellstones to the characters' ring weapons (three to a weapon, with the level of the stone you can attach limited by the ring's slots) and killing enemies in battle.  The reason why this is a problem is simple... only the character who deals the fatal blow to an enemy gains ability points for their... abilities.  A warrior who can take out five enemies at once with the use of the circle strike knack is going to find it easier to learn abilities than a mage or archer that can only strike one enemy at a time (synchronize spells later on to cast area spells utilizing multiple characters... but it still can't beat the quickness of AOE knacks). 
    The greatest help to the player is the fact that you can buff before going into battle using spells, thus eliminating the need to tie up magic users in buffing for the first part of a battle.  Considering that most story battles have time limits, this is an issue.  This game rewards clever use of the systems like the arena and buff spells and will seriously sodomize you if you go through the game without thinking or preparing.
    Overall, Growlanser IV was the series' peak, and it saddens me greatly that the series was killed in the PS2 era.  This game is about sixty hours long for the first playthrough (successive playthroughs are easier), and it is one of the better rpg stories I've ever played, being somewhat reminiscent of Suikoden, which is funny, considering they rose to cult popularity around the same time.
     
  7. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, NaNoRenO 2020 Highlights, Pt 3 – Romance VNs (Non-otome Edition)   
    Hello there and welcome to the third and final part of my NaNoRenO 2020 highlights! While in the first two posts I focused, respectively, on otome and horror VNs, this last batch of recommendations will be about other romance stories submitted to the event. I have to admit upfront that this is likely the least exciting list of the three, with no game standing out to me in a similar way as Enamoured Risks did among otome entries or Eislyn's Apocalypse did among horror ones. However, there's still a bunch of solid and interesting titles in this category, my favourite being probably Café in the Clouds, with its lovely visuals and memorable dreamworld sequences. Also, the jam has something to offer for fans of all typical romantic configurations, with BxG, BL and Yuri couples strongly represented.
                     As always, all the games I'm writing about are completely free to download, and clicking their titles below will get you straight to their Itch.io pages. Also, I've skipped projects that were submitted to the event but proved low quality or did not offer a complete experience (meaning I exclude all demos and prototypes by default). So, please join me as I wrap up this insane, months-long project of thoroughly covering the biggest NaNoRenO in history – hopefully, you'll find something interesting among my recommendations.
     
    Love Rewind: A Magical Time Travel Romance (BxG/BxB)

    Love Rewind is a short romance story with one male and one female love interest, themed around regret and desire to change the past. Yuki, the protagonist and young mage-in-training, loses everything in a futile attempt at saving his terminally ill mother. Broken by this failure and the destroyed relationship with his fiancée Quinn, he isolates himself from the world – an empty, depressing existence that would likely last for the rest of his life if not for the appearance of a spirit, taking form of a cat. This powerful creature forces on him an opportunity to relive and change the events that led him to ruin, and regain the love he lost – or maybe forge a different path altogether…
                      This VN, while a bit rushed and lacking the proper buildup particularly for the BxB arc (Quinn’s route at least have the background of protagonist’s relationship from the original timeline), has a few things going for it. Yuki is a decent protagonist, whose desperation and pain are easy to emphasize with, and the core story has all the satisfaction inherent to plots where you avert a looming disaster. The love interests simply don’t have enough time to develop as characters and truly shine, but they work well enough as incentives for the protagonist to not repeat his past mistakes. The end result is not a great romance VN, but a nice short story in its own right – and one that looks and sounds very solid for a game jam entry.
    Final Rating: Recommended
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  8. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Ramaladni for a blog entry, Master Magistrate Full-Version Review   
    https://j-addicts.de/master-magistrate/
    After a couple months of wait, the full version of Master Magistrate was released! This review is an update of my early-access review. I removed or corrected outdated information, polished my thoughts a little and added my thoughts on the final chapter and the epilogue.
    Master Magistrate is a pretty cool murder mystery detective visual novel with a historical setting.You'd be hard pressed to find something quite like it, the closest would probably be Great Ace Attorney or Elf's Mikagura Shoujo Tanteidan. Overall, it has a bit of a weak start with its introductory chapter, with the pacing picking up on the second one. Third chapter is hands down the best for me, in terms of gameplay, plot and character development and the last chapter makes for a great finale, tying perfectly all the loose ends and expertly resolving all of the unsolved mysteries. Exciting revelations and myriads of twists await you. And if you're a fan of the more SoL parts, the heroine routes are nicely integrated in alternate epilogues for the story. There's porn too (it's optional, just buy/don't buy the Adult DLC).
  9. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, nothing & nowhere (Western VN Review)   
    Note: I was provided with a review copy of the game by the developer.
    To talk about the latest slice-of-life VN by ebi-hime, nothing & nowhere, we have to start in a less-than-obvious place. Nearly two years ago I made an overview ebi’s freeware games and one of the most memorable and unique of them was Lynne: a heavily stylized, pixelart horror game about a teenager crumbling under the pressure from her dysfunctional family and societal expectations she's unable to truly meet. Full of suffocating atmosphere and visceral dream sequences, it is to this day one of the most effective horror experiences I’ve seen in the medium and one that ends on an abrupt, but appropriately disturbing note. Nothing & nowhere, while representing a completely different climate and stylistic, is basically an alternative timeline spin-off of that game, offering something probably every person that read Lynne wished for – some form of respite and hope for the future to the game’s tortured protagonist.
                    Interestingly enough, after being released in mid-May 2020, nothing & nowhere was not marketed directly as a sequel or spin-off of Lynne. Even the Steam page only mentioned the connection at the very end of game’s description, suggesting it’s above all a standalone story, despite sharing the central character with its horror predecessor. In my experience, however, it was exactly that link, and the extra context being familiar with Lynne provided me with, that made the new game a truly worthwhile. More than that, I’m willing to argue it's likely be the same for most potential readers, for a few crucial reasons.
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  10. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, NaNoRenO 2020 Highlights, Pt 2 – Horror (Updated)   
    Hello and welcome to the second part of my NaNoRenO 2020 coverage, where I’ll be going through the most noteworthy games submitted to the most recent edition of the biggest EVN game jam. While in the first part I focused on otome and other GxB romantic VNs, this time I’ll tackle the niche that, in my opinion, contained some of the best projects in the whole event – horror. Once more, I’ll be focusing on complete projects, rather than many demos and prototypes that get submitted to NaNoRenO – and thanks to the extended deadline devs worked with this year, that’s still a lot of interesting content.
                    One game from the previous post, Dream Dilemma, also fits into this week’s theme besides featuring GxB romance – however, it was a rather unremarkable, simplistic game and most of those I’ll be writing about today are anything but that. So, please join me in this quick overview of NaNoRenO 2020 horror VNs – and as always, whenever one of them catches your attention, clicking its title in the list will get you straight to its Itch.io games. Of course, all the titles I’m covering are completely free to play. Let’s have some scary (and slightly messed up) fun!
    Divilethion

    Divilethion is far from your typical scary VN, tilting more to the side of grotesque horror-comedy, with visuals and writing style that contrast heavily with the grim essence of its story – and do so in a brilliant, at times hilarious way. The game follows Lynn, a young high priest in an isolated village “protected” by a monstrous god named Divilethion. While the entity is the only guarantee of survival for the community surrounded by monster-infested swamps and regularly plagues by disasters, the price for its “miracles” is steep – every time, a villager has to be sacrificed and his heart fed to Devilethion. Lynn, cynical and disturbingly diligent about his duties, is soon put to the greatest test yet by the apparently bored deity, asked to sacrifice one thing he might not be willing to give up…
                    As serious as this story setup might sound, what sets its tone as primarily a dark comedy is Lynn’s warped perception of the reality around him and the grotesque enthusiasm Divilethion requires from his worshippers. This combined with an unrelenting writing style, never shying away from harsh language and disturbing story developments, creates a striking experience that will likely keep you engaged all the way through, to either a relatively-positive or deeply unsettling conclusion. While overall the game is relatively short, it’s just so full of personality and meaningful story developments it’s hard to not be satisfied with it. I deeply recommend checking it out – very few hour-long VNs left me with such a strong impression.
    Final Rating: Highly Recommended
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  11. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Rainbow Dreams (Western VN Review)   
    Epic Works is a pretty unique phenomenon in the EVN scene: an African studio, developing games openly inspired by the Type-Moon visual novels and other classic chuunige. Their first release, Episicava, was something of a glorious trainwreck, launching with multiple technical problems and borderline-unbearable, edgy storytelling replicating most of the worst tropes of the chuuni game subgenre. The follow-ups included an unholy abomination of a nukige known as Analistica Academy, and a clunky and inconsistently written, but occasionally appealing RPG VN The Adventurer’s Tale. None of them proved genuinely impressive, but each showed some forms of progress, particularly in the visual department, which by the time of The Adventurer’s Tale’s release got both appealing and consistent in style and quality.
                    As unhealthy curiosity is one of the driving forces behind my blogging endeavours, I couldn’t stop myself from being attracted by the studio’s second Kickstarter campaign, aimed at creating another chuunige-style VN in the Episicava universe (although with no direct connection to the latter’s main plot). Despite my disappointment with their debut titles, I was very interested whether this new project, Rainbow Dreams, would represent an improvement for the studio and correct the massive issues with tone and writing quality those earlier games suffered from. And despite apparent development issues and heavy delays, resulting in a January 2020 Steam release, I’m happy to say that while not all problems were remedied to an appropriate degree, when it comes to the sheer entertainment factor, Rainbow Dreams is a major step in the right direction.
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  12. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, The End of an Actress (Western VN Review)   
    Human beings are contradictory creatures, whose behaviour is rarely as consistent as we would like to see and whose motivations are often complex, to the point they’re not fully understood even by the specific person themselves. This fact is often minimized in fiction, which instinctively strives for clear narratives and characters that are ultimately possible to fully understand and assess according to some kind of moral standards. At the same time, there’s undeniable value in exploring the ambiguity of the human condition and ebi-hime is one of the EVN authors that do it with a borderline-painful consistency, often creating harsh or melancholic plots and populating her stories with deeply flawed, realistic-feeling characters. And her latest release, The End of an Actress, definitely do not break this trend.
                    Released on Steam in late February 2020, this new title by ebi is loosely based on the last years of Marie Antoinette’s life, where she was imprisoned by the revolutionaries and eventually executed for her perceived crimes against the French people. It transfers these core events and many features of the queen’s biography into a fictional setting, closely resembling 18th-century France, but without any pretences for full historical accuracy. However, instead of a grant political tale, what plays out on this stage is a very intimate drama involving the deposed queen, Liliane, and Marcus, a revolutionary who led the assault on her palace and unwittingly became her jailor. In isolation and hopelessness, the relationship between the two will be redefined in a few possible directions, fluctuating between naïve fascination, hate and, possibly, mutual understanding and affection, making for a rather captivating literary experience and one of my new favourites in ebi’s catalogue. But what makes it this special?
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  13. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Steam Curator Wrap-Up – Winter 2020 (Legend of Everything; Weeping Willow; Usagiri; Revenant March; Tell a Demon)   
    Hello and welcome to EVN Chronicles' seasonal Steam Curator Wrap-up, where I cover the VNs sent to me for review through Steam's Curator Connect functionality. Lately, I’ve come to a sad realisation that I’m unlikely to keep up with all the games I’m receiving, with the appropriate tab in my Steam library growing more and more intimidating over time. However, I’ll be still working to give a chance to as many of them as possible, and assess them for all of you.
                    This time around, I've been able to check out five titles, the main highlight being the newest VN by the Indonesian studio Kidalang, Legend of Everything, with its deeply unique spin on the isekai formula. This is, however, not where the interesting stuff ends, as the climatic Revenant March and wonderfully-stylized Tell a Demon also proved to be strong contenders, making this one of the most compelling lists I've worked on in this series. So, please join me in this brief overview and if any of the games catch your interest, you can go straight to their Steam pages by clicking their titles. Enjoy!
     
    Legend of Everything

    Legend of Everything is definitely the most unusual visual novel in today’s post, particularly because of its subject matter. At first glance, it might look like a simple spin on the isekai formula, with an inhabitant of a fantasy-themed, video game world being the protagonist and interacting with a particularly chaotic person transported there from our reality. However, pretty soon it transforms into a giant thought experiment, and basically a lecture on the simulation hypothesis – the idea that our universe is actually a simulation created by some advanced intelligence. This notion might seem absurd at first glance, but is made less so the more you learn about modern physics theory and strangely arbitral rules that govern various phenomena it describes. While never fully abandoning the formula of comedic fantasy adventure, Legend of Everything thoroughly explores this idea and conveys tons of legitimate science knowledge, basically becoming the most moe course on modern science you're likely to can find, presented in a highly accessible, but genuinely educational way. If you’re at least marginally interested in this kind of topics, the game should be quite enjoyable to you.
                    What’s less impressive, in my opinion, is the visual side of the experience, dependent on subpar-quality 3D sprites and environments. It’s particularly disappointing in contrast with the rather-stylish art in this studio's previous titles, An Octave Higher and One Small Fire at a Time. However, I was pretty quickly able to look past it thanks to how enjoyable the writing was, consistently combining well-constructed science discussions with quirky characters and humour, and even some epic and heartfelt moments worthy of a “proper” fantasy story. Saying anything more would inevitably involve spoilers, so I’ll simply recommend everyone to check this game out – it offers a lot more than you’d expect at first glance.
    Final rating: Highly Recommended
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  14. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Clephas for a blog entry, Senren Banka   
    Before I go into this VN, I should probably bring up a few facts I’ve noticed about Yuzusoft VNs in general.   First, while most Yuzusoft VNs have a central story that is vital to the heroine paths as well as the common route, the degree to which that central plot effects the heroine paths varies pretty wildly.  In some cases – such as with Nicola in Dracu-riot – the effects of the main plot are almost nonexistent, and in others – such as Miu’s from the same VN – the effects are dramatic and integral to the progression of the heroine’s own story.  Another aspect is consistency… or rather, the degree to which heroine paths are consistent with one another.  Generally speaking, Yuzusoft games don’t strive for absolute consistency.  One reason is because most charage writers (and Yuzusoft writers are mostly charage writers) are not nearly as good at managing the numerous ‘threads’ of their stories as a chuunige writer has to be.  To be blunt, Yuzusoft games tend to eliminate the need for consistency as much as possible, limiting ‘contact points’ between the heroine routes wherever they can.  Unfortunately, there are always minor details that slip through the net, so you can’t really expect perfect consistency in any charage. 
    Another aspect of Yuzusoft VNs is that they still utilize the concept of ‘heroine salvation’.  The idea that a heroine needs to be ‘saved’ by the protagonist on some level used to be integral to virtually all VNs that tried to charge the emotions of the reader, but it fell out of use over time as the emphasis shifted from story to characterization in most cases.  Yuzusoft is somewhat ‘old-fashioned’ this way, as they focus strongly both on the actual ‘stories’ of the heroine paths as well as the characterization aspects.  As a result, for those of us who get emotionally invested in the characters, the inability to ‘save’ the heroines you didn’t choose is always a bit… troubling, lol. 
    I know that sounds weird coming from a self-proclaimed pragmatist like me, but that is one of the few areas in which VNs are still mostly games, rather than just reading material.  The act of ‘choosing’ a heroine inevitably invests you just a little bit emotionally in the heroines, barring a kusoge experience, lol.
    Yet another thing to keep in mind about Yuzusoft games is that the company, even after all these years, is still experimenting with the ratio of ichaicha (lovey-dovey flirtation in the girlfriend/boyfriend part, such as dating, visiting one another’s houses, h-scenes, etc) to the actual story and character development.  Most of their games tend to have long (in terms of text) dating/lovey-dovey/sex periods, which can be unbelievably annoying in a VN with a good story, lol. 
    Last of all, Yuzusoft games tend to have longer heroine routes on average than most moe-VNs.  I’d say by about one and a half to two times, depending on the other developer.
    Now, having gotten that over with, enjoy my comments on this VN, as I plan to go into more detail than usual.
    PS: I don’t intend to bother with the two sub-heroines, Ruka and Koharu.
    Common Route
     
    The beginning of the VN is somewhat fantastical, and with a little effort, they could have easily turned this into a light chuunige (I’m actually wondering why they didn’t, considering how suited many members of the cast are for that type of VN).  One of the most fortunate aspects of this game is the fact that very little time is spent dwelling on school life… in fact, it is probably the least relevant portion of the game, outside of the character setting of ‘gakusei’.  In my experience, the more reliant a VN is on school life for character development and story progression, the less likely it is to be interesting from beginning to end.
    The basic story is that the protagonist, having drawn the sword from the stone (lol) by breaking it off at the hilt (viva, self-repairing holy weapons!  Haha), ends up engaged to and living with the himemiko, one Tomotake Yoshino.  He’s also together with a bodiless loli who presents herself as the guardian of the sword calling him her master, and a ninja who does all the cooking and cleaning around the shrine. Apparently, in order to cleanse the taint left by an ancient curse on Yoshino’s family and prevent disaster, he has to help them fight dog-monsters in the mountains around the town, so that their taint doesn’t build up enough to cause natural disasters and other tragedies.  The common route is consumed by the quest to free the Tomotake bloodline from the ancient curse and the characters’ travails in the process.
    For better or worse, the central story of the VN is nearly completely resolved in the common route, leaving the heroine routes for those heroines’ personal issues.  This does mean that the tie-in to the central background story in the heroine routes is weaker than in some of Yuzusoft’s other games, such as Dracu-riot.  However, the common route itself is actually one of the better ones I’ve seen from this company, and I enjoyed the process immensely.  The downside is that the transition feels a bit awkward, sadly.
    Murasame
     
    Murasame is the overseer of the holy sword Murasamemaru, and Senren Banka’s resident loli.  In a lot of ways, she embodies the archetype of the ‘outsider/exile from life as we know it’ heroine archetype that has popped up occasionally in VNs like this one.  Favorite, in particular, is a company that loves this heroine archetype, utilizing it for the true heroine of every one of their games, and a disproportionate number of the heroines of this archetype are lolis (somewhere around two-thirds, starting with Ilyasviel from FSN).  This is probably because a childlike heroine who suffers from that kind of isolation is more likely to strike at our hearts.  She started out as a common village girl, and when a sacrifice was needed to become the guardian of the sword, she gave up her humanity to stay with the blade (this isn’t really a spoiler, since they tell you this early on and it is in the character profile, lol). 
    Murasame comes across as your typical ‘loli who hates being treated like a child’ most of the time, but her speech and manner in more serious scenes shows at least some of her experience… and her path rakes her over the hot coals of her own personal darkness and insecurity.  Hers is a path that is all about salvation through love, and it is one that can’t help but resonate with romantics in general.  I should know… I cried several times in the course of this path.
    I honestly felt that this path represents Yuzusoft at its best, and for this path alone I would have been willing to play the game… and I’m not even a lolicon. 
    Mako
     
    Mako… is the descendent of a ninja family that serves Yoshino’s family (Yoshino being the white-haired hime+miko heroine).  While she is deadly serious about her duty to protect and serve Yoshino, her personality is generally friendly, cheerful, and easygoing.  She is also more than a little… motherly in the sense that she loves to take care of people.  This tends to express itself in the common route through her devotion to never letting Yoshino or her father do anything around the house outside of their duties as a priest and miko at a Shinto shrine (and Yoshino’s duties as the sole descendent of her mother’s family line).
    To be honest, her path is significantly more boring than Murasame’s, in that her personal worries are ‘classic’ worries from the archetypical ‘raised to serve’ heroine who is suddenly free to do what she wants, along with the fantasy worries unique to her path.  It is still a good path, even touching at times.  However, since they fell back on what amounts to a ‘normal’ love story with a half-humorous twist, things were significantly less interesting from my point of view.
     That isn’t to say that it doesn’t have its high points… but most of those are toward the end or involve the fantasy elements.  I’m sure the people who adore the junai (pure romance) that is the staple of most VNs will lap it up like their favorite flavor of ice cream, but for someone like me who has been fed that stuff until he feels like a foie gras goose…
    Yoshino
     
    The structure of Yoshino’s path is something of an exception, looking at charage with a serious element in general.  Most of the time, the serious element is focused at the end of the path, with the ichaicha part making up the early parts of the path, during and immediately after the formation of the relationship.  In this case, the dramatic part happens immediately after the formation of the relationship… and the rest is essentially endless ichaicha and sex.  The path has impact, but I honestly thought that the latter part of the path dragged on.  However, the ending is pretty touching, and I was honestly happy for them afterwards.
    Overall
     
    Yes, I have no plans to play Rena’s path immediately.  To be honest, just two paths in this game takes up ten hours, and with the common route, this game could easily hit thirty hours if I played all the paths… and I don’t have the energy for dealing with an airhead heroine right now.
    Overall, this VN is one of the better Yuzusoft games I’ve played (considering that I’ve yet to encounter a Yuzusoft game that wasn’t at least worth consideration for a VN of the Month, this is a definite compliment).  It definitely beats out Sanoba Witch, both in terms of raw quality overall and in terms of the design of the setting in particular.  While the game itself doesn’t escape a lot of the clichés of the fantasy charage with story sub-genre, it carries them out well enough that I didn’t find that irritating.  The biggest downside of  the game is the downside to just about all of Yuzusoft’s games… the ichaicha is far too extended and there is usually a lot of runaround before they get to the point. 
    PS: By far, Murasame's path is the best... which probably means I should have played it last.  For better or worse, after seeing Murasame's path, it felt like a betrayal not to choose her over the others, simply because of her situation, lol.
  15. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, VenusBlood FRONTIER International – Steam Version (JP VN/sRPG review)   
    When it goes to the Western market for Japanese eroge, VenusBlood FRONTIER is one of the most interesting marketing phenomena in the recent past. Belonging to a series that is most known for its corruption theme and related sexual content, it was rather brilliantly rebranded with a focus on its in-depth gameplay mechanics and the morality system which allows players to shape the fate of its fantasy world in various drastic ways. It is also a game I was highly anticipating because of its rare premise – the ability to play as an anti-hero protagonist who can either become a ruthless oppressor, or a benevolent tyrant protecting the world from destruction and terror. All this coupled with a set of goddess heroines that can be either corrupted into obedient tools, or allied with for the goal of protecting the innocent people trapped in the apocalyptic conflict, and destroying those responsible for starting it.
                  The international version of FRONTIER is also a bit more than just a Western release of a classic SRPG – it is, by most measures, the definitive version of the game, with significant improvements and new content added thanks to the localisation project's Kickstarter funding. Its goal was very clearly to attract both English-speaking and Japanese players, which at the same time it makes it even more of a notable treat for the non-JP audience. High-budget games of this type very rarely appear outside of Japan, and even less often reach Steam, but the Western release involving significant improvements rather than just cuts and localisation-related glitches is borderline unheard of. 
                  This doesn’t mean that the road onto the biggest PC distribution platform was without hurdles: the final version, released in late January 2020, had to make some concessions when it goes to suggestive content and language, deviating from the initial “all ages” version the studio created. However, the full 18+ version is, in the old-school fashion, available for Steam players through a free patch, and what's worth pointing out, even that version gives a convenient option for opting out of all explicit content. Just by selecting the “skip extra scenes” option in the settings you can avoid h-scenes completely, making the whole game pretty approachable to players that would rather skip the porn and focus on the core story. And in my experience, even the most “compromised” Steam version is a complete-feeling and satisfying experience. But, what exactly it has on offer and can Ninetail really hope for it to get the attention of more "normie" crowds?
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  16. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Soundless -A Modern Salem in Remote Area- (Western VN Review)   
    There were few EVNs in the last few years that I’ve seen seriously hyped up by other VN fans and brought to my attention through multiple recommendations and positive reviews – particularly beyond titles by a handful of relatively well-known and respected creators such as ebi-hime. The game I’ll be writing about today, Soundless -A Modern Salem in Remote Area-, is one of such exceptions, enthusiastic opinions about which intrigued me to a major degree, even though it ended up being two years before I finally picked it up. And this is not where the curious and unusual things about it end: this freeware visual novel was released in late 2017 by a small circle under the name of Milk+ and is heavily influenced by the denpa subgenre of horror – one reliant on distortion of reality and chains of bizarre events, true meaning of which is usually hidden under multiple layers of mystery. It mimics extremely well the visual style and climate of the early 2000s’ Japanese games, offering a now rarely-seen call-back to parts of visual novel history highly nostalgic to many fans. And thankfully, there’s a lot more to it than just the interesting stylisation and riding on memories of the past…
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  17. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Maggot Baits (JP VN Review)   
    Maggot Baits is something of a Holy Grail of dark eroge, highly anticipated guro fans within the Western VN community and often hyped as possibly the greatest achievement of the company that produced it, Clock Up. As one the most gruesome VNs ever produced, and quite likely the most brutal one ever brought to the West, it contains dozens upon dozens of violent sex scenes, all accompanied by intricate CGs, with small variations in them so numerable that they sum to nearly 2500 unique illustrations. All of that placed in a highly-unique, modern-fantasy setting populated by amazingly-crafted characters and tackling interesting philosophical and religious topics. While it’s pretty much the furthest possible thing from what I usually write about on this blog, few games intrigued me as much as this one, particularly after my inconsistent, but extremely interesting experience with Clock Up’s another famous title, euphoria. Everything I’ve heard about Maggot Baits suggested that it was both more extreme and overall better than studio’s other bestseller, and after reading it to completion, I felt the need to share my thoughts about it in detail. Both because it’s a pretty fascinating case of strengths and pitfalls of this breed of eroge, and to warn those interested in it as a piece of storytelling – while in many ways an incredible achievement, this game is extremely hard to recommend for a “normie” reader such as myself. Why is that exactly?
                    Before I go into story details, it’s most important to deal with Maggot Baits’ greatest issue – its structure and general storytelling formula. This game is, at its core, a guro nukige and it’s incredibly dedicated to this template. It throws h-scenes at you at very consistent intervals, disregarding whatever might be going on in the story and sacrificing any sense of pacing or tension so it can constantly offer a new piece of violent hentai. Quite often, the scenes are not important for, or even directly connected to what’s happening in the plot, pretty much pausing the whole narrative to insert a new piece of fanservice. In this, it goes even further than euphoria, which did a much better job intertwining its scenes with the story and had a bit more restraint in the most dramatic and meaningful parts of the plot. Maggot Baits even goes to the length of adding a major side-branch in the first chapter of the story, which is nothing but 3-4 hours of futanari porn leading to a bad ending. All of it narratively empty and pretty much derailing your experience if you expect any kind of interesting reveals or a meaningful conclusion within it. I still don’t understand why it was a part of the main story, and especially inserted so early in the game, before you build any connection to the characters involved or can understand the full implications of what is happening in those scenes. 
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  18. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to kivandopulus for a blog entry, VN of the Month September 1993 - Youjuu Senki -A.D. 2048-   
    Youjuu Senki -A.D. 2048- is not really a masterpiece at all, but without strong competitors I find it entertaining enough to be called VN of the September 1993.
    1. Nurse Yuu no Muma Sensen ナースゆうの夢魔戦線 [930904] Wendy Magazine 1 2 "Nurse Yuu no Mumasensen" is an adventure game with a rather cryptic story. The player controls a young nurse named Yuu, who finds herself near a secluded military hospital, unable to understand whether she is dreaming or not. She then begins to work at the hospital, becoming more and more intrigued by the events happening in it. There is an English review.  
    2. Ooedo Tantei Kamiya Ukyou Vol. 1 大江戸探偵 神谷右京 Vol1 [930908] Altacia Detective Kamiya Ukyo is asked for an investigation, but the client is killed with her head chopped off. There was Ukyo name in the will, so agency took up the case. The series had its fan base, but game was postponed for a long time due to underdeveloped graphical technologies. Author of the script was an active detective at that time and game synopsis based on real events. Still, first two games had about 60% of fiction still involved to give the story more depth. And since the work was written by criminal expert, there is quite much uncommon terminology used. These first two works are still done in anime manner and for pc-98, but later works for Windows platform get much more serious design and reality feeling. First work is not polished enough to be considered a masterpiece, but second work is right in that zone.  
    3. Tinkle - Zenimusume てぃんくる [930909] Agumix 1 The great evil was prevented by the four legendary heroes, but the threat has awoken again. Elven heroine Narushi and her loyal pet set on a journey to get four crystals that would break the enemy's defense. Each crystal is hidden in a three-layer labyrinth. There is a Polish review available with some machine translation.  
    4. Houma Hunter Lime Dai 04 Wa 宝魔ハンターライム 第04話 [930910] Silence 1 In this episode Lime and Mizuki work as waitresses in a local cafe in order to detect the presence of a BEM. After having located the monster they become unexpectedly attached to it, which makes it harder for them to recover the jewel. Each episode is very individual. This time Mizuki plays the most important role while our heroes just observe the drama from the side.  
    5. Mouryou Senki Madara Daikongourin Hen 魍魎戦記MADARA 大金剛輪編 [930910] Kogado Studio 1 2 3 4 The game is based on the manga series Moryou Senki Madara. The story is set in a mythological era in Japan, and focuses on twin brothers, Madara and Kage-Ou ("Shadow King"), sons of the evil Emperor Miroku. While Kage-Ou follows in the footsteps of his father, Madara fights against him and for the good of mankind. The game begins as Madara is gravely wounded in his fight against Miroku, but is saved by a young warrior named Seishinja, who lives together with his sister Himika. Before Madara is cured, Seishinja has to fight demons himself, with the help of the legendary sword Kusanagi. This is a small part of a big franchise of some five series of manga and supporting content. First you have to fight alone, then Madara awakens and main character shifts. Unless you have the game manual, you wont be able to know chakra (magic) combinations. This VN ending differs from original manga since the main character here is set to destroy the world and recreate it for himself and no happy ending is seen.  
    6. Night Shifter ナイトシフター [930910] Four-Nine 1 Once upon a time, there was a young boy who loved motorcycles. Riding through the night on his bike was what he enjoyed most - until one night he crashed into a car, and was taken to hospital. There, he wakes up to find out that he'll have to go through some injections and infusions, which scares him so much that he faints... and immediately finds himself mysterious transported to a bizarre magical realm, somewhat inspired by Alice in Wonderland, with well-dressed rabbits, smoking caterpillars, but also plenty of cute girls. It turns out that this Wonderland isn't that bad - but how hard will it be to conquer the hearts of its pretty inhabitants?.. Looks like this game imitated Classmates, but without time dimension and with much lower production values. Lawful and Chaotic personalities only influence some CG and speech. Choices that have to be done from time to time hardly influence anything at all. So there's hardly a plot, just exploration of Wonderland with ultimate aim to get out.  
    7. Viper-V8 Viper-V8 [930910] Sogna 1 2 The second entry in Sogna's long-running Viper franchise, Viper V-8 has the same format as its predecessor: three separate short stories with minimal interaction and animated sex scenes. The three stories are: Friday the 18th: Obviously, a parody on horror movies, telling the story of three young girls who were sexually assaulted by mysterious masked men when camping near a forest. Demon's Night is set in medieval times and describes a battle of three young heroes against a vicious demon. One of them is killed in battle, while the other (a girl) is captured by the demon; the remaining warrior, a young man named Ryu, has to rescue his friend. Alien Wars takes place in the future. A young space pilot named Sylvie is ambushed and captured by aliens who have nothing else in mind but to have sex with her... There is an English review.  
    8. Ayumi-chan Monogatari あゆみちゃん物語 [930915] Alice Soft 1 The premise of Ayumi-chan Monogatari is rather simple: the protagonist, a young boy named Kouichi, is in love with the most beautiful girl in his school, Ayumi Kawai. One day she admits that she also loves him, and they begin a relationship. Plot is virtually non-existant and the whole point is to try each intimate date something new to get new CG and eventually get 100% CG. Very few works had CG galleries accessible in game and I don't think any measured completeness of opened CG in percentage. And thanks to graphics and cute character design the game was really popular. The game was made in close partnership with the active bbs fans which is also an impressive model that no other company could pull out. It's an important game for the visual novel history, but apart of all the novelty I only see a nukige here.  
    9. Custom Mate カスタムメイト [930917] Cocktail Soft 1 A young man finds a mysterious box. Making sure no one is at home, he opens the box and finds a scroll with a magic incantation inside. He chants the magic spell - and immediately a cute female elf appears. She says she can create any girl the hero wants. But once the girl is created, he has to figure out how to win her good graces... An easy seduction SIM which precedes a wave of SIMs in the second half of 1990s. Graphics is quite uneven.  
    10. Kachou Shima Kousaku: Super Business Adventure 課長 島 耕作 スーパービジネスアドベンチャー [930917] Yutaka 1 2 The game allows the player to play the role as a Japanese salaryman as he goes on his "employment adventure" in order to accomplish negotiations for business deals. Occasionally, the player will have to do stuff with his girlfriend and explore his office building in order to accomplish things from his employer. Game was based on popular manga and it's very realistic - it deals with dirty corporations ethics, racism, pregnancy... so it was scraped for release in the West. Series are closely connected with the original, at times for the bad, at times for the good. For example, letters are presented as in the original with its complexity, but some of the choices player makes won't have effect at all since they weren't reflected in the original. So it might be a nice game to try unless it was japanese famicom only.  
    11. Youjuu Senki -A.D. 2048- 妖獣戦記 -A.D.2048- [930917] D.O. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 The apocalypse known as "The Third" occured as a result of mankind's tasting the deadly fruit of nuclear technology. The massive radiation released in the holocaust of world war mingled with the genetic fallout from biological weapons, creating horrific mutations that came to be called "Yoju". These beasts bred in the bodies of humans and multiplied, covering the blighted landscape and pushing humanity to the brink of extinction. It is now the year 2048. As mankind's final gamble in the struggle against the Yoju, a squad of genetically engineered cyborgs was created - the Anti Strangebeast Special Police (A.S.S.P.) whose members possess combat ability far beyond that of normal humans. They have been programmed with the complete database of anti-Yoju strategies and tactics researched over years of war. These female biosoldiers have become humanity's last line of defense against total annihilation, and you have been chosen to command them. There are English reviews.  
    12. Ah! an Ah! an [930922] Wendy Magazine A collection of two short stories: 1) Face of Hakuhaku 2) Yukari laboratory Both of stories have 2 and 3 branches and endings, respectively. Game was ment to be Vol.1 of the series, but never got continuation. Drawing won't be to everyone's liking. H events are the center of the game and those are animated. The stories are too short even considering branches.  
    13. Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor - Griffon Hen 機動警察パトレイバー グリフォン篇 [930930] Riverhill Soft inc. 1 2 3 4 Digital Comic Patlabor is based on the anime series Patlabor. In the near future, officers of Tokyo Metropolitan Police pilot giant robots called "Labors" to combat criminals. Like most installments of the anime and manga, the game focuses on characters from Special Vehicle Section 2, Division 2, and the playable character is Noa Izumi. More specifically, the game follows the so-called "TV timeline", involving the Labor Griffon. There are English reviews.    
    14. Shangrlia 2 SHANGRLIA2 [930930] Elf 1 2 3 For a while peace was reigning in the magical Kingdom of Hyunckel. However, dark forces have emerged again. Commanding hellish creatures, they managed to capture the top female generals of the Hyunckel army, sealing them in special devices resembling eggs. Only three generals remained free, and they must liberate their companions and re-capture the land. There's little to be said. You either played prequel and don't need review or not played prequel, then it's better to start with that. The complexity of rules increased with sequel significantly.
  19. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Blog update + my VN FTL university project   
    Hello there, all you good people still following my content-starved blog! There will be no regular review post this week (I’ll be catching up next week with one about Reine Work’s Our Lovely Escape, and hopefully a week after that with one of the long-overdue games sent to me for review), but I’ve wanted to take this opportunity to share the reasons behind the recent slowdown on the site and talk a bit my plans for the future. A warning: this will contain a lot of personal musings that most of you are probably not very interested in. However, I kind of need this opportunity to vent and reset. I’ll add a tl;dr version at the end of this post.
    Outside of my, not-extremely-successful attempt to jumpstart a new wave of activity on Fuwanovel, there have been a few other things happening behind the scenes. The major one was my academic project on visual novel fan translations, which led me to submitting a paper for an international fan studies conference in Cracow. Preparing the speech in English (this was the first time I wasn’t speaking in Polish on such an event), running a survey with people involved in fan translation projects… It all took a lot out of me and gave me little time and energy to actually enjoy VNs as such. It also coincided with a minor health issue, which despite its non-threatening nature made it impossible for me to sit straight for nearly two weeks – a truly infuriating thing when you should be working on your computer and are basically running out of time. This was probably a major factor which destroyed my motivation for working on the project, which in turn made it be the most painful and depressing one to date. I, however, still made my short presentation in the presence of prof. Matt Hills, one of the most influential researchers in my obscure field of study, and learned quite a lot from other speakers. Here’s some photographic proof, courtesy of my girlfriend who once more agreed to help me inflate my ego by documenting my speech. 😉

    As you can see, I was asking the Heavens to help me and my listeners to get through those 20+ minutes of my horrible English accent. Not sure to what degree my prayers were heard, but at least there were no fatalities. Oh, and in the lower-left corner, it’s Matt Hills. That was both awesome and terrifying.

    And here’s a rare moment where my conference ID wasn’t hanging backwards! You can see the fear in my eyes – one would think after nearly 10 similar presentations I’d be a little bit calmer, but it’s apparently in my nature to stress out over everything.

    And here’s me taking one of two questions that were still possible to ask after I’ve used all the discussion time for my way-too-long PowerPoint slideshow. And yup, I will insert Flowers whenever that's even remotely appropriate. Suou x Rikka forever. You can't stop me!
    While, in general, my project was fruitful and I’m satisfied with my performance, I also ended up so physically and emotionally drained that I’ve ditched the other two days of the conference, just enjoying my time in Cracow. Even after coming back, I had a day of what could be described as a full-on breakdown before I kind of got my shit together. All this, of course, has some very real consequences for the blog: for quite a while, I didn’t have the time and energy to really read VNs. And, obviously, without any new material to cover, I didn’t write anything either. It’s the first time since establishing the Blogger site that I have no “emergency” posts to use or quick ideas to supplement more involved write-ups with, even despite switching to the biweekly schedule. And honestly, I don’t expect to write much in-advance anymore. The “one post every two weeks” frequency is here to stay and I’m going to be flexible about it, switching content and dates when necessary.
    The other thing is that I still want to make the blog a little bit more of my personal space. I’ve kept up the regular stream of content both to become a better writer and to prove a few things to myself. I think I’m satisfied with what I’ve achieved, and while I’m definitely not discarding the general profile of the blog and the responsibilities I’ve taken upon myself (like covering the games sent to me), I’m going to have fun with it too. Write silly stuff connected to the weeb culture and my peculiar experience with it. I’ve already hinted at this at the beginning of the summer, but I’m even more determined to make it happen now. No hobby I’ve picked up over the years was this intellectually stimulating and satisfying as this one and I want to do all I can to keep it this way– I can't let things go too stale.
    And while I’m doing all this weird stuff and overthinking things, I hope you guys will stay and still read my crappy writing. Exploring the creativity and passion of EVN devs is not something I’ll ever get tired of, and I hope we can enjoy their stuff together for years to come. Thank you all for following my work, and until next week!
     
    tl;dr I’ve been to a fan studies conference which, together with minor health issues, ate a month and a half of my life. I’ll get back to “serious” posting next week, returning to the bi-weekly schedule. I might sneak in some weird posts about Japanese popculture between “proper” EVN ones. EVNs are love, EVNs are life (still). See you next week for actual content!
  20. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Steam Curator Connect Wrap-Up: Summer 2019   
    Check out my interview with Georgina Bensley, the founder of Hanako Games, published recently on Fuwanovel
    Welcome back to another one of my seasonal (yup, I get enough things sent my way for that to be a thing now) summary of games given to me for review through the EVN Chronicles Steam Curator page. Once more, I’ll be focusing on the shorter titles, that would most likely be hard to write a full-length review about or had to give up their spots for games I really wanted to cover in detail. This, of course, doesn’t mean there are no really interesting VNs among them. In today's list, the title standing out the most is undoubtedly Jack-In-A-Castle, a whimsical tale about a world populated by living toys and a marionette investigating the disappearance of its king. This extended version of a free NaNoRenO 2019 VN proved to be an unusual and twisted experience that caught me completely by surprise. While the other three games I’ll cover this time didn’t offer similar levels of quality, all of them proved interesting in their own ways – even if they didn’t subvert my expectation quite like they wanted to...
     
    Jack-In-A-Castle

    Every once in awhile, I stumble upon small VNs so unusual and creative that they’re hard to categorize. Jack-In-A-Castle is, by its own admission, a rather cute, cartoonish boy’s love story happening in a fantastic world populated by animated toys. However, there are a few caveats to it: the BL label feels somewhat irrelevant considering the androgynous designs of the main characters (particularly the protagonist, Marion) and the relatively tame relationships they develop. Between all those cute living toys and minimalistic love stories they’re involved in, gender barely seems to hold any meaning. At the same time, the cartoonish art can be misleading in its own way – the game features some mature themes and the characters, Marion in particular, can be quite devious and even violent (although such things are mostly presented off-screen).
                    The three hero routes all develop in pretty unpredictable directions, leading Marion to resolve the mystery of the missing king and the tenuous regency of his right-hand-man, Jack, in vastly different ways (or not at all). This makes for a surprisingly engaging and fun experience – varied, cleverly written and executed with a lot of attention to detail. The game’s environments change to reflect the plot progression (mainly through the constant spread of mysterious vines infecting the titular castle). What seems like throwaway choices can lead to some drastic consequences, completely subverting your expectations. Everything is presented in a distinctly stylish manner, with the simplicity of character and background designs being outweighed by their expressiveness and the quirky atmosphere they create. The overall impression I’ve got from Jack-In-A-Castle was extremely positive and I highly recommend checking it out – unless you’re hoping for traditional VN romance, it definitely won’t disappoint you.
    Final Rating: Highly Recommended
     
    Elf Enchanter: Arousing Anima

    Belgerum is a developer of small hentai games that combine VN-style storytelling and simple, RPG-like battle mechanics. After his surprise hit from 2018 NaNoRen0 contest, Demon King Domination, he capitalised on it with an extended, commercial version that reached decent popularity on Steam. Later he also created a follow-up game, Magebuster, once more featuring a supernatural, villainous protagonist and an antagonistic heroine he has to dominate. His third title, Elf Enchanter, was meant to partially break away from this formula, being a “pure” visual novel and not focusing so much on dark themes. 
                    Featuring a support mage that accidentally casts a taming spell on his dark elf companion, making her incapable of opposing his commands, it sounded quite intriguing in theory: I usually find games where you’re given complete power over other people, and can use it for either good or bad, very compelling. Elf Enchanter, however, does very little with this setup: featuring only a few choices and three possible endings, it’s too short and basic to really engage you in its narrative, while the 5 h-scenes (two unavoidable one and one extra per each ending) are average in quality and only one of them stands out with some unusual elements. It’s quite adequate as a $1 nukige (that’s how much it costs on Steam), but ultimately very forgettable – and that’s a shame, as with just a bit more content and complexity, it could’ve been a really cool experience worthy of a much more serious price tag. Maybe another time…
    Final Rating: Cautiously Recommended
     
    Kingdom of Lies

    The fact that Visual Novels are somewhat easy to put-together, even without any programming prowess or high-quality assets involved, makes it quite common for extremely low-effort ones, or straight-up troll games in VN form, to reach Steam. Kingdom of Lies looks like one of the latter, a cynical attempt at trolling and getting attention with edgy content, but is actually something a bit different – a confusing, broken and ultimately unplayable mess, that still quite a lot of work and thought went into. It features a really strange story about a maniacal-murderer protagonist, guided by a demon (represented by gradually-decaying rat corpse) into a killing spree in a modern-fantasy setting. It then combines it with some literally-impossible Hotline Miami-style gameplay sections and minigames that will make your head hurt (although the combination of shogi, go and chess on a three-dimensional board and with a possibility to modify rules was pretty hilarious). All of that coupled with MS Paint-grade visuals, tons of anti-SJW memes and high levels of randomness. It’s quite possible that I haven’t seen this much effort going into something so overwhelmingly bad since Sonic Boom and if the game was just a battle bit less broken, I could’ve even suggested checking it out for its hypnotizing trainwreck-like qualities. It also involves a few genuinely cool ideas: for example, the rat corpse/demon you communicate with before every mission is quite disturbing, with the constant decay and disease it seems to spread all around it being well-portrayed despite the simplistic graphics. In reality, though, the experience of playing Kingdom of Lies is just too confusing and frustrating to be worth it.
    Final Rating: Not Recommended
     
    Caladria Chronicles

    Caladria Chronicles is a debut VN by a small studio called Starlight Visual, one which was meant to launch a whole saga set in the titular modern-fantasy world of Caladria. It’s also, by most measures, a rather spectacular trainwreck: overly ambitious, unfocused and grossly unpolished in its execution. The full voice acting is a mixed bag at best, with some characters being hard to listen to and whole lines misplaced or missing. The narrative lacks clear protagonists, and introduces way too many character and subplots within its 3-hours reading time. The humour is very much hit-and-miss, with two rather unbearable chuuni characters at the center of most of the gags. The anime clichés are everywhere and their presence, along with many explicit references to Japan, are utterly confusing unless you took your time and read the game’s encyclopaedia, explaining many crucial lore details that are never properly communicated in the story. An encyclopaedia which, BTW, is also full of errors and clunky writing.
                    Why do I leave this game with a positive recommendation then? Not because I necessarily advice reading it, but because of a huge potential I see in its setting and some of its characters. Caladria is a copycat world – a planet whose people used the help of mystical being known as angels to gain knowledge of Earth’s history, technology and culture. They then proceeded to copy and expand on all of it, boosting their own development in incredible ways. In the process, Caladria lost most of its own identity, with whole nations mimicking Earth’s civilizations and identifying with these artificially-imported, second-hand cultures. With a few forms of magic and a tumulous political situation added to the mix, the setting itself offers great promise, even if the first game only briefly touches on its most interesting aspects. While for now, Caladria Chronicles can be only worth experiencing as an unfortunate curiosity, if its authors manage to learn from their mistakes, they have a good basis to create something really memorable and compelling. Skip on this VN, but keep Starlight Visual on your radar – personally, I’m extremely curious where the Caladria project goes next.
    Final Rating: Cautiously Recommended
     
    And this would be it for this season’s Steam Curator summary! I hoped to include at least one more game in it, but the real-life responsibilities forced me to move it to the fall update – that one will hopefully be more substantial, including some more notable games and ones that were waiting particularly long to get covered. Still, I hope you all enjoyed this small update and as always, my huge thanks go to the developers that decided to share their work with me. I hope this feedback, even if not always positive, will be of use to them and maybe even inspire (even) better VNs in the future. Until the next time!
  21. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, No One But You (Western VN Review)   
    In our obscure EVN market, there are rarely games or events that could be described as major controversies – even the most unfortunate releases or Kickstarter disasters usually don’t involve enough people and money to gather the attention of the community for a longer period of time or spark a mass backlash. Along with Aeon Dream Studios’ k-pop fan game debacle (a really amazing story of incompetence and borderline-fraud, if you care to follow it), No One But You is possibly the most controversial and polarizing EVN ever released. Appearing on the relatively-barren landscape of early 2015 and promising experience similar to the high-budget Japanese VNs, it sparked a lot of interest and hope for the second coming of Katawa Shoujo – an EVN that would not feel overly niche or amateurish, but actually capture the charm of beloved Japanese titles and rival them in its storytelling.
                The reality, of course, proved much more underwhelming. The unexpected Kickstarter success (the campaign reached over 1200% of the initial, $1200 goal) resulted in a highly upscaled and complex project, developed within just a year by then still-unexperienced Unwonted Studios. Involving a network of over a dozen writers and artists, and a heavily-rushed release (which was never moved from the initial KS campaign claim despite of many major features being added through stretch goals), No One But You was eviscerated by many reviewers, with Fuwanovel notably giving it lowest possible score in two separate articles, and received only a mixed reception from the readers after showing up on Steam on January 2016. In a way, it remains one of the most infamous story-centric EVNs, possibly only beaten by the cheap ecchi titles such as Sakura games in the amount of hate and ridicule it gathered. However, looking at it three years later and with all the fixes and additional content added post-launch, is it really that bad?
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  22. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Without Within Trilogy (Western VN Review)   
    In the EVN world dominated by clichéd romance stories, titles by InvertMouse, a long-time indie developer from Australia, stand out in a few significant ways. Staying away from most common genre tropes and easily-marketable story elements, the games he creates often focus on topics such as friendship and struggles of everyday life, rather than grand tales of romance and adventure. The three short VNs in the Without Within series are particularly unusual and interesting in this regard, tackling themes of ambition, motivation and talent in life of an artist, in the rare setting of modern-day Australia and South-East Asia – all of this in a highly comedic style, but not without serious messages underlining the, most of the time, silly storyline.
                    Another thing that makes these games interesting is their complicated development history. The first Without Within was a very short, freeware title, published in December 2014 as one of InvertMouse’s earliest works. The second, commercial entry followed nearly a year later, showing up on Steam in December 2015 and offering a much more substantial story, but in a very similar production quality and tone. The final game, however, didn’t release until mid-2018 – by this time its creator had a lot of more experience and technical prowess, which makes it a visibly different experience from its prequels. Still, with how short and thematically-consistent the three games are, I’ve decided to tackle them as a single package – the third part ends in a rather open-ended way, but with InvertMouse moving away from VN development, it’s pretty clear that the whole trilogy should be treated as a complete story and there’s little chance for any kind of continuation. So, what is Without Within series about exactly and what makes it worth your attention?
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  23. Thanks
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, Shining Song Starnova (Western VN Review)   
    Love in Space, authors of the highly-appreciated Sunrider series, are a very peculiar kind of EVN developer. In their games, they unapologetically cater to weeaboo sensitivities, copying the Japanese storytelling tropes and stylistics pretty much in every aspect of their games. Sunrider: Liberation Day, the second Sunrider titles was the clearest example of this, with its Japanese speech mannerisms (which look at least a bit questionable in English prose), Japanese voice acting and pompous, Japanese opening song – each of them included despite the story being placed in a fictional sci-fi world with no clear connection to Japan, and being directed pretty much exclusively to Western otaku audience. Thankfully, the studio also was able to supplement its second-hand Japanese identity with some interesting ideas, consistently high production quality and, for the most part, compelling stories.
                    After the second Sunrider game was completed (and after the backlash from its controversial conclusion was partially mended with an alternate-timeline DLC), Love in Space decided to double down in their turbo-Japanese formula, announcing Shining Song Starnova – a game about a Japanese idol producer trying to turn a team of misfits into major stars of the entertainment business. Funded both through a large Kickstarter campaign and substantial Patreon support, it became the studio’s most ambitious project by far, promising, among other things, seven heroine routes, partial VA by a cast of experienced eroge seiyuu and a high-quality soundtrack appropriate for the game’s music-related main theme. After long development and delays caused by Steam policy changes, SSS was finally released in July 2018, to quite a lot of fanfare, and sparked genuine interest from the VN community. But, was it able to deliver on its ambitious goals?
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  24. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, 2019 Steam Curator Clean-Up – Half of the Year Edition (Snowed IN, The Great Voyage, Manna for our Malices, Lyantei, Courage for a Kiss)   
    Hello and welcome to this year’s first EVN Chronicles Steam Curator Clean-up, where I look at the games that were sent to me in the past six months through Steam’s Curator Connect, but were either too small to warrant a full review, or I simply couldn’t cover them in detail due to time constraints. When I first did this kind of posts last year (you can check them out here: Part 1, Part 2), some of the games featured there waited extremely long for being covered. Because of this, I’ve decided that from this point forward, I’ll make this a twice-a-year event, being sure that every VN given to me gets its space on the blog within a reasonable time period. As always, I’m extremely thankful to all the developers that send me their work for assessment and it saddens me whenever my impressions are negative. I hope, however, that the feedback I can offer will be valuable to them, while believe it’s my duty to my readers to warn them against buying a game I find lacking. So, setting the introductory drivel aside, I hope you enjoy this brief overview of these four interesting VNs sent to me during the first half of 2019!
     
    Snowed IN

    Snowed IN is an unusual yuri nukige, focusing on pair for soldiers in the distant future, where cybernetic enhancement of the human body has reached incredible levels of sophistication. The protagonist, Sigma, is an experienced spec-ops officer who has modified her body to the point where little of it remains organic. For an infiltration mission against a cell of anti-augmentation radicals, she’s assigned with a fresh, talented recruit – a full “natural” named Linde, whose presence in the military is connected with an affirmative action plan for those not augmented. The two polar-opposite individuals, both through their background and attitudes, have to work together to survive the extremely dangerous assignment – and the mission itself hides even more threats and twists then the initial setup would suggest.
                    Sounds intriguing? It surely does, but the fact this is a nukige, and a very short one at that (up to an hour and a half of content), should be taken into account when setting your expectations. The game explores its main themes rather briefly, often switching to sex scenes that are only vaguely justifiable in the context of the tense plot – the writing and main intrigue are solid, but simply too rushed to provide a compelling narrative. There are also some highly-questionable elements to it, especially in the rather distasteful bad ending – that’s definitely one point at which h-content was very unnecessary, even if those scenes are the “main point” of the game. As a piece of yuri smut in an unusual setting, it's definitely not the worst thing around – just don't expect anything more than that.
    Final Rating: (Cautiously) Recommended
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  25. Like
    Templarseeker reacted to Plk_Lesiak for a blog entry, DoraKone (Free Yuri VN Review)   
    While it’s easiest to find high-quality free EVNs during popular game development events such as NaNoRen0 and Yuri Game Jam, from time to time there are small gems that pop up more or less out of nowhere, created either by hobbyists or as side projects by veteran developers without any particular occasion. One of the most interesting (even if infrequently active) collectives that created this kind of games in the past few years is Apple Cider, a team co-founded by DejiNyucu, a Chilean artist known for her distinct and high-fidelity character art. Over the last 10 years, she was involved in numerous visual novel projects developed under various labels, including my all-time favourite erotic VN, Cute Demon Crashers. This personal fondness of her work made me that more excited when I randomly discovered Apple Cider’s latest release, free yuri VN called DoraKone.
                    Released on Steam in December 2018 despite its summer theme, DoraKone is an extremely cute, comedic GxG romance VN. It features four girls that meet and befriend each other over a dragon-themed, Pokemon GO-style augmented reality game Dragon Connection (DraCo for short), all of this in an unusual setting of an unnamed Chilean town. The energetic protagonist, Dulce, is a newbie that starts her adventure with DraCo after buying a new smartphone and quickly encounters three more experienced players: shy and kind Rayen, rash and competitive Brin, and spoiled rich girl Honorée. Depending on your choices and meeting events you pick, Dulce will get closer to one of the heroines, becoming a close friend with her, or even something more, while also either winning or losing the DraCo tournament held in her town. This creates over twelve possible endings, nearly all of them wholly pleasant and lighthearted.
    Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
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