ChaosRaven
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Still, I don't think the solution is that moege readers suddenly start reading just nukiges instead. The signs for the industry would be... fatal.
At least I wouldn't call the majority of VN's turning from moeges to nukiges an improvement.
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Thinking about it, the answer came to me startlingly quickly... it is because it satisfies people's nether-regions and their desire for idealized slice-of-life with a few quirks without actually having a personality. The very reason I hate it is the reason it has caught the interest of some in our community, and I find myself smiling wryly as I realize that most of the people who play it are only interested in fapping to archetypical moe-heroines.
Understand, I actually don't have any objections to non-extreme fap material or moe fap material. I don't have problems with others' sexuality in general (as long as they don't inflict it on me or create victims along the way). However, I do have to wonder why these same people don't hit up one of the dozens of moe-nukige that get released every year instead, lol.
Eh, what?! You're criticizing that people like romance with ero because those titles might not be the deepest ones, and then advice them to play simple nukiges without ANY personality at all instead?
You should also keep in mind that your perspecitive is different from the typical English VN reader simply because you can read Japanese and freely choose from all the VN's the Japanese market has to offer. The typical moege everyone likes to bash might be the most common release in Japan, but that isn't the case in the west. The majority of VN's we get are story VN's and then some nukiges from time to time.
Moeges usually have the lowest priority - we get maybe ~2 bigger ones per year. And half of those are even from fan translations, otherwise it would be just the one MangaGamer release per year. And the released nukiges are either extreme fetish ones like Starless, all ages 'Steam-nukiges' like many Sakura titles or shovelware of the lowest quality. I think the only major developer of story VN's who isn't active in the west is actually Light. The other ones like Liar-Soft, Nitroplus, Innocent Grey, AkabeiSoft2 and a bunch of indie ones - we get them all. And how may moege developers are active in the west, maybe 5-10 %?
That's not to say I wouldn't understand your situation, since you're more or less buried in generic moeges every month. But the situation is simply different for most English VN readers since the ratio of moege to story VN releases is almost reversed. And what else can people use for judging a new VN than art and a small synopsis which says almost nothing in case of a moege anyway, since ratings are just slowly dribbling in and reviews don't exist yet.
There's also something that's bugging me for some time now. And that's the assumption that story VN's with a decent plot 'automatically' also have good romance and characters with great personality in it. And that's unfortunately not the case - AT ALL.
Let's have a look at Innocent Grey's take on romance: Boy meets girl he hardly knows or just has a working relationship with. Girl says "Hey, wunna ****?", boy answers "Yeah, let's ****!" followed by an H-scene. That's Innocent Grey and romance in a nutshell. Now let's take Tokyo Babel and see how it approaches a grim apocalyptic setting where humanity, angels and demons got almost extinct in several gruesome massacres: Let's build a high school for people who are already thousands of years old => slap stick festival => brutal murders followed by battle for life and death => slap stick festival => impaled victims burning in hellfire and screaming in agony => slap stick festival. Yeah, it does have some good scenes and interesting ideas, but is that really supposed to be admirable 'character building' with the only person that seems to somehow reflect the situation being the protagonist? And don't get me started with the character simpletons in Root Double - it's essentially a kids novel.
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Kind of expected. The title caught my eyes some time ago because it had some very nice art. But I felt rather bad vibes coming from it from the start. The title, some screenshots - it was literally screaming dark fetish rape. What a waste of good art.
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It's actually pretty hard for me to get addicted to a game nowadays since I get saturated pretty fast. It's almost the opposite, it's hard for me to get motivated to even start a new game even if it's a good one. I guess less time than in my younger years is probably the most likely reason, though not the only one.
Still, I played Dota 1 for almost 2 years regularly cooperative against the AI with some friends. That was a really fun time. Then we switched to LoL, the AI sucked and we played more competitive against other people and the game almost turned to stress with people getting too ambitious and upset when games weren't going well. And so I lost motivation and stopped. I was never really interested in competitive play since I play to relax not to prove something.
However, people are different, some friends of mine really enjoy the competitive part. Even if they get upset sometimes, it's somehow easier for them to come down again afterwards. I seem to be more... resentful.
Always kept some distance from MMORPG's since I didn't want to start a second 'life'. I also care more about story in RPG's than other people which is usually a weak part of those games.
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It's actually hard to imagine MoonStone going Innocent Grey gory style. But well, wrapped up in a good murder mystery story, color me interested.
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Unlike the Koihime Musou series, there is no battle system involved here, which is great, considering that the story of this thing alone is about 1.5 times the size of Shin Koihime Musou, which was twice as long as the original Koihime Musou. In other words, this is probably the longest kinetic VN in existence, right now, easily surpassing ChuSinGura and leaving works like Grisaia in the dust as far as sheer size goes.
*gasp* But that means... MangaGamer will never translate a text monster like that!
Especially if it's also difficult to translate, and the voice costs are probably horrendous.
And I thought they could *at least* translate Sengoku † Koihime if they passed on Shin Koihime...
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2 hours ago, Clephas said:
Mmm... to be honest, I don't really demand historical consistency, but when there are bits that match the actual history, I usually can delight over them. As for Hakuoki's cast being believable *snickers*. There is no such thing as a believable set of otomege heroes.
There's still a vast difference between just idealizing historical characters (all stories do that to a certain degree) and not even getting the gender right.
If the female gender is suddenly the dominant fighting force this implies that they are physical more powerful than men. So are men now staying at home and caring for the children while the girls are doing the hard physical labor, working in mines and working the fields?! It simply has major consequences on how the world would be supposed to work.
But naturally, you could just say they are a selected group of super heroines, but that immediately turns it to fantasy instead of 'historical'. However, there ARE guys who have outstanding strength in real life so I can believe that, but I can't exactly say the same for girls. Take the Klitschko brothers for example, they simply fight (or fought) in their own league for almost a decade now. But even a very strong woman would have a hard time beating just a man with average strength.
Edit: Granted, your blog post is titled 'historical fantasy', but I still find it easier to believe scenarios and stories if they follow the rules of real life.
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I actually prefer it if VN's with an all girls (warrior) cast in a historical setting are more light-hearted moeges like Kohime Musou instead of serious dramas.
If a serious VN presents me such a cast, it already lost a lot of its credibility in my eyes. Because in a serious VN I somehow expect a certain amount of authenticity of the setting and scenario in order to accept the story. But if a writer first introduces an unbelievable cast and then tries to go super serious, he runs the risk to ridicule himself. Since for me, not only the writing itself defines the quality of a story, but also the selection of the cast and scenario for it.
For that reason, if I want a 'serious' historical story, I'd pick something like Hakuoki with an actual believable cast over something like ChuSinGura 46 + 1 anyday. But if I want moe I really love those ridiculous harem casts.
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27 minutes ago, Clephas said:
A lot of it is that the central story is so... uninteresting. Pirates? That would be fine if it didn't sound like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean based on the IM world. What makes it worse is the multiple protagonists thing... to be blunt, Eushully handles single protagonists just fine, but when they split their attention, things tend to get boring. Eushully specializes in dramatic stories with a central protagonist, and I honestly thought that the decision to make all the faction leaders into story protagonists was horrible while reading about it. After all, with strategy games, just managing a single story would be a pain in the ass...
I think the idea had potential, but naturally if you can't pull it off... things can get messy.
Astronauts Dungeon of Regalias also seems to be a bit underwhelming so far, and if Alice Soft also screws it up it'll be a pretty bad year for gameplay titles. Though at least Dragoon 2 seems to perform better than I thought.
But the titles this year don't look that great so far anyway (I emphasize the word 'look'). Are you really sure this will end better than last year?!
Though there's still August's new Sen no Hatou on the horizon - a glimmer of hope...
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I fully agree here. I've a Steam account with a gazillion of games (I'll probably never find the time to play) if I want to really play somehing with good gameplay. So if I read a VN I want to mainly 'read' not play. The Gameplay parts should just be a nice distraction, and grinding is definitely the last thing I want to do in a VN. For that reason I usually prefer more 'second-rated' gameplay VN's which have more simple but fast past-paced systems like in Koihime, Haruka or Demonion.
Rare exceptions for me would be very high quality titles like Eushully stuff because they have both very refined gameplay systems and good content inbetween (judging by Kamidori). Still unsure if I should give Seinarukana a try. Receptions are mixed and the gameplay seems to be very grindy again.
Oh btw, if you really plan to play Eushully's new Sankai Ou no Yubiwa, then you better be prepared for some severe disappointment. And not just in the way of 'just average' like last year's Kami no Rhapsody, but more along the lines of so utterly horrible that it's the worst thing they ever released. Ratings on VNDN and EGS are shockingly bad. I also consider it somehow weaker in the artistic area than their previous titles, so they might really have messed it up completely this year. Well, at least my Eushully backlog won't get even bigger this year as it already is...
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Ugh, I can't stomach hard utsuge at all, I've already problems with the soft ones to get emotionally too involved. I'll make sure to keep a mile distance from this one.
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Your description of Jeanne sounds more like the title isn't really your cup of tea and less that it would be necessarily bad. The last title of the writer was Fairytale Requiem which is probably the pinnacle of surrealistic fantasy with its 'Alice in Wonderland on steroids' scenario. Certainly a bit too much for my taste, but Jeanne seems to be toned down quite a bit, which would be about right for me. The mystery part doesn't sound that bad to me considering you once said that you're not a big fan of mystery if I remember right. So, ironically your description doesn't sound that bad to me since I do like mystery and I'm more tolerant if it isn't perfect. At least as long as the story doesn't get too ridiculous or the characters are total failures.
BTW, what happened to your play-though of Gears of Dragoon 2? Was it that bad for you that it wasn't even worth rating?
Ah, and speaking of RPG/ VN hybrids, do you intend to try Eushully's upcoming Sankai Ou no Yubiwa? On first sight I wasn't exactly overwhelmed, but apparently you can start the title with 6 different protagonist characters, 3 male ones and 3 female ones, and each one has a different story. I think that's almost a novelty, not only for Eushully but for VN's in general. Character selection at the start reminds me more of western RPG's. I'm curious what they made out of it and if the usually very long play-throughs are shorter because of that.
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The new Liarsoft VN Tokeidai no Jeanne is actually their first release in ages I'm actually interested in. I like their new art style, it's not written by Sakurai and the story sounds interesting - what could go wrong?!
Would be nice if you'd give it a try and it turns out be a good title.
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Hmm, while I don't think that the religious background will give me any sleepless nights, the lack of character focus or attractive (=interesting?) heroines might get a problem for me. It better have a damn good story to make up for that.
I wasn't exactly blown away by Ayakashibito. The common route was very promising, but the actual routes were pretty lackluster. The only route that was kind of okay was Kaoru's, and even that was more because Kotarou was coolness incarnate than anything else.
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Having to start over and over again in a title with gameplay sections sounds super annoying. Bit of a shame, the series actually looked quite promising.
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It's the same artist so there shouldn't be that much differences I guess. Though the protagonist in the first one looks older and I think there are more loli's in GoD2.
Anyway, currently it's certainly not particularly high on my reading list, but I'll keep an eye on the VNDB ratings.
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How does it compare to the first part so far? Somehow the characters from Gears of Dragoon 1 looked much better than the ones from Gears of Dragoon 2 but that doesn't say anything about the inner values.
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I guess I'll read it sometime in the next months. The big official English releases of this year like Da Capo 3 will probably not be released before summer, except Tokyo Babel maybe. So it's probably a good time now. I just have to get finished with Noble Works first.
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I wonder if the fan translation will ever get finished. So far I was waiting, but I'm actually thinking about just reading it despite that. It's all about Sora anyway. I could die for those white haired angels. I love them all - Eden's Sion and Erica, Grisaia's Kazami, Fate's Illyasviel, Hoshimem's Mare, FMP's Tessa. And I have to read Tsuriotsu for Luna even if it's in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
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5 hours ago, Clephas said:
The original Koihime Musou would definitely fall under the concept of the 'ero-moege' as you stated it above, but the actual amount of h-content:story in Walkure Romanze and Unionism is too low to make either of them even borderline nukige (a nukige generally has to have at least 30% h-content to seriously be 'all about sex' and none of those games get anywhere near that). Kamidori... honestly I don't like remembering Kamidori, but too much of it is gameplay and to many of the character designs don't fall into the moege regions for it to fit either.
I don't know, I wouldn't call a title like Unionism Quartet which has about 50 H-scenes with harem patch light on H-content anymore. Walkure Romanze maybe, since some of it's scenes are actually just kissing scenes and all of them together are still below 30. I think the M&M titles I played from Atelier Kaguya and Astronauts still had below 100 scenes and I consider them already nukige territory, except maybe Kirya Shimai. On the other hand, Beat Blade Haruka aparently has about 200 scenes which is certainly... yeah, that's really an insane amount of H content.
Not sure what you mean with many Kamidori's character designs not being moe. I mean, I can understand that Sugina Miki's designs from Innocent Grey or M&M's designs might be considered not exactly the classic moe style, but Eushully girls looks as moe as it gets. Though I agree that the title is probably better called gameplay hybrid than ero-moege despite its heavy H-content.
6 hours ago, Clephas said:Generally, most non-ero VNs are on console exclusively, though there are exceptions (Tokyo Babel, certain of Key's games, etc). However, as a whole they are a very small amount of the market production. Since most people who play untranslated VNs over here are dependent on text hookers, there has never really been a need to establish jargon for them, and there is no specific genre - as far as I can tell - for ones without ero-content, though all games with erotic content in Japan are eroge, universally (visual novels, ero-rpgs, etc).
I think with Steam releases getting more and more popular, VN's without H-content will also get more common. So the term 'eroge' will continue to get more and more unfitting to include them all. At least for the market of VN's with an English translation, which is, granted, still rather small compared to the Japanese market. Still, it kinda hurts if a title like Eden is called just a eroge.
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I think I really saw the term chuunige used the first time in this forum, however I mistook it first for chuunibyou and couldn't understand what's so fascinatiing about a genre about a particular annoying type of teenager who has some screws loose. Since the term was used for some VN's I had already read, I somehow caught on its true meaning. I think it does a good job to specify a rather common type of action-oriented story VN and I therefore started to use it myself. Not sure if I'm really using it correctly though, since for me it's just an action VN with a teenage hero.
I don't really feel comfortable with the charage term though. It seems to describe a character focused VN or a VN that puts a lot of effort into developing its characters. But for me, that's not really a genre, it's more of a trait of a good VN since you can find well developed characters in all kinds of VN's: nakige, utsuge, moege, chuunige, nukige... not so much. If someone calls as VN a charage, I don't really know what to expect, except that it has probably well developed characters. So I'm not really using that term myself despite having seen it used frequently.
Maybe it's just me, but I somehow have the feeling that the common term 'eroge' is used more rarely now than it used to be. I don't really like it myself since it's often used as a synonym for visual novel, but since visual novels don't necessarily have adult content this is simply wrong. Instead I came fond of the term moege since it somehow fits very good to the common type of light hearted VN's about pretty girls. It also works for both, VN's with or without adult content which makes it compatible will all ages VN's.
I've also started to use the sub-term 'ero-moege' to describe moeges with a strong focus on adult content like Koihime Musou, Walkure Romanze, Unionism Quartet or Kamidori. They are not nukiges, but I would only suggest those titles to people who are interested in the H-content. Not sure if it's perfect but it works for me. I actually would prefer to call them eroges instead, but unfortunately this term is already (mis-)used for all VN's.
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Those people have it with cats, do they? They worked in a company called 'Cait Sith', which is a fairy cat from celtic mythology, and created a game where a bakeneko cat girl tries to ascend to a nekomata super cat girl. Then the company gets disbanded and the members move to another cat obsessed company called Nekoneko soft. I'd never guess what kind of pet those guys might have at home.
Signs of a saturated market: Charage/moege
in Clephas' VN home
A blog by Clephas in General
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Nope, I've continued some more since then and now I'm almost finished with route B. Unfortunately, it didn't really improve in comparison to route A even if the style is very different.