EdwardWongHPTIV

Well, any extreme can be bad. I've read many a story with interesting characters, setting, and introduction only to have the ending collapse under it's own weight because of too many story threads. I'd rather have quality over quantity. Either characters or plot. Walking talking archetypes/tropes is just as bad. Balance in all things as they say. That said don't hate fluff. Especially if it's self aware or a parody. While I don't know if it really qualifies as fluffy, the recent anime that comes to mind is Konosuba. Taken individually it's characters and story aren't very deep, but overall it works great as an inversion/deconstruction of a setting/genre that's been too popular of late, imo. Love the MC.

I sorta figured, but, hey, I was trying to think positive for a change! True the world could use less fluff and more substance.

Mmmm... Noodles. I want some ramen and not the instant kind. What's wrong with word substitution? It's done on porpoise, it's in no way due to our laziness or dependence on auto spellcheck. May the internet rot our brains. On topic - Not sure how I feel about moege just yet. I haven't played enough to form an opinion.

*sniff* Why can't we have nice things? Seriously though, I told you, everything thing I like gets dropped. Ok not *everything*.

lol, I know that feeling. I might be new to VNs but I have read waaaaay to much manga. To the point I'm extra critical of them and only like maybe 1 out of 10... well probably worse tbh. Once you've seen the same tropes and scenarios 100's of times they lose any appeal they had. It's a love/hate thing and I keep looking for those few I find entertaining. One trend I find depressing is that the more original a series is, the less popular it is, and the more likely it will be dropped. I'm sure that's an oversimplification but I've seen so many series I like dropped that I've begun to wonder if the masses really *do* like to be feed the same song and dance over and over again. At least most VN's are 18+ so I don't have to worry about "will they or won't they" or protag is the average every man boring high schooler... oh.. wait.. Nah, I've liked about 25% of the VNs I've read so far so that's an improvement I remember enjoying the Dracu-riot manga. Though I don't remember much about it. Still, I became interested in Yuzusoft's VNs because of it. Have to get around to reading one.

Now you're just being silly.

So to summarize - Learn Japanese > VN Hook+Atlas > Hook+Web > 5 year old > Bing? Well sounds like they need to start freezing human translators on their death beds. When the technology becomes available we can transplant their brains into a quantum-binary hybrid supercomputer with time dilated man-machine interfaces. It will run a sadistic AL taskmasker artificial life construct tasked with supplying all the brains-in-a-jar with a constant stream of text to be translated, proof read, etc. Surely they wouldn't mind be forced to translate for decades as a disembodied brain-in-a-jar! Someday we'll be living that dream! And we'll get fast translations of all the text! Into every language! From every language! Unfortunately, due to a completely avoidable error in a recursive routine, the TL supercomputer will lose track of what it's translated and get stuck in an endless loop translating everything in the world over and over again. Worse still it's workload grows exponentially until it consumes so much global resources that it renders the planet uninhabitable. Humans die out and still the supercomputer attempts to translate. TL:DR - Learn Japanese but do not become an organ donor?

You're choices, morality, and affection matter! Oh, but we might not be able to import any of that. It's a new engine and programming is hard!! Oh, and I like how he nonchalantly admits that this game isn't even a drop in the bucket story wise. If there are 4 planned games and this is the 3rd, you'd normally think we'd be close to 75% through the narrative. Yet he claims we're barely halfway thru! Ummm...

Yeah, I'll definitely check into it. I might even be able to get one of my siblings to tag along. The eyes glazed over 'lets humor them' look you get when you go on about an anime or manga? I know that feel. VNs are even worse because a lot of people just assume they're all eroge or filled with gratuitous amounts of fan service. Though, I suspect at least one person I know is in the closet. Some people just aren't comfortable with talking about it.

Bah, only one of my picks were on the top 10. While admittedly I got my start reading VNs on steam. I'd prefer DRM-free releases available elsewhere. Not that complaining will change anything, I'm sure steam is the best selling platform for them, and they'll probably sell even more that way now that steam keys aren't a thing. Meaning a trend to all-ages.

You know I've never gone to a Con... Some friends/family have in the past but I never got around to it. This thread has got me interested. Unfortunately Seattle is a bit too far for me. There was a time I'd road trip or fly just about anywhere for gatherings and such but I just don't have it in me anymore. I'm showing my age Funny thing is I'm never played Katawa Shoujo. I keep meaning to... I'm fairly new to VNs as well. I've known about them for a long time but hadn't taken the plunge until recently. Which is strange considering how long I've been into anime and manga (lets just say decades).

As space cadets in love are wont to do as they are about to release? I'm sure it's easy to get caught up in the moment and go with the flow, if you know what I mean.

Hmm.. the plot summary sounds like freddie invades psychonauts with an eastern twist. Which largely means slice of life highschool drama! lol maybe. I'll watch the video later. But I must say the writer being of evangile "fame" doesn't get my hopes up. Though tbh I don't know how it works in the VN industry. Does a writer present/submit a rough script for consideration or does a VN company simply brainstorm some rough ideas of a scenario and have the writers flesh it out? Well, putting aside VN's adopted from manga/light novels/anime/etc. If the writer typically comes up with the whole scenario on his own then I feel justified in being a little hesitant about this writers work. If instead the writer has to work within the confines of a scenario others come up with I guess I can sympathize a bit.

As far as the VNDB ratings go I try to only rate things I've actually played. Assuming there's a significant number of people that do the same that leaves the ratings easily manipulated by fanboi's, etc. Unlike steam reviews you can't even verify ownership (not that steam reviews are much better with paid reviews, etc.) so in the end I'd take the ratings with a grain of salt. Honestly the number of votes and review threads are more meaningful then the actual rating number, imo. Did they actually commit to having the Japanese seiyuu in any of their crowdfunding? If they did they pretty much set themselves up for failure as far as I'm concerned. I mean they'd have to write the script in both english and japanese from the start. If they never made any such commitment then I think it would have been better to write the script in english, release the game, and then offer a voice pack that reflected the success of the game. If it was wild success then, sure, do the Japanese voices and OP. If it was moderate success that at least met their sales goals then stick to western voices or skip the voice pack altogether.

Afaik they share characters and nothing else.

Eh? Only one was free. Well, I haven't looked into myself but someone was saying they had one KS for a whole trilogy? I think they just didn't do a good job estimating the costs or budgeting in the first place.

This thread has ruined my perceptions... forever. What about all the depictions of impassioned fans of VNs in manga? That wasn't real life?!!? *Gaaaaasp* Oh, noooooooo. Hmmm. I'm hungry. *walks off*

I have yet to play a Yuzusoft game and I'm still hyped.

Well, enough of the subjective posturing over who's viewpoint is correct or complaining about who's complaining ad nauseam! How about 360 TB of crystalline storage with a projected lifespan of 13 Billion years *in* a fire of up to 374 F or 190 C. Well maybe fire is an exaggeration, but baking is permissible. Link So in 5-20 years when (if) this tech comes to market we can archive the shit out of our VNs. Happy end?

Nothing wrong with offsite backups, is Denpa going to advocate that in lieu of this change I wonder? Well, I guess it depends on the reliability of the connection on both ends. Is a download going to be counted at the start? Or only when the server confirms the last packet sent? Will they be offering a hash of the file so you can verify it downloaded correctly? Will they support restarting partial downloads? What about when a virus hoses their machine and they reformat without thinking? Oh, right, we're supposed to burn copies on read only media. You're right. Back in the day of purely physical distribution that was the case (unless you had proof of purchase or a CD key then sometimes you could get a replacement disc for a nominal fee). But we're talking about digital distribution on a platform that, until now, allowed unlimited downloads. It's hard to stick the genie back in the bottle. Using the nature of physical copies as an excuse, while reaping the benefits of digital distribution is a bit hypocritical. Oh, I agree, like you I horde my games. But I outlined a number of reasons how the typical user could run out of downloads, and then, on top of whatever caused their data loss, they're going to have to deal with email lag time. It's frustrating. Adding salt to the wounds. Not a good position to be starting from when it comes to customer service. Is it the end of the world? Certainly not if Denpa keeps up their part of the bargain (not that anyone had any say in the matter). I just don't accept their reason. Cut costs in lieu of fraud? Sure, I'm on board. Especially if they educate people on how to keep their data safe. People are hijacking accounts that use the same credentials as other sites and this is a stop gap until they can implement 2nd factor auth? Go for it! Unlimited downloads are unfortunately an untenable practice in this market? Yeah, I wish VNs were more popular too. Hell, I'd even be fine with paying a reasonable amount per gigabyte, past the allotted *verified* downloads, *if* they patched their shit and had 2nd factor. Instead of being fans we're now painted as part of the problem. People are sharing accounts. They don't want to do this, but we shouldn't have shared our accounts. oO *edit* Ok, I get it. I'm the annoying new guy that has unreasonable expectations. I'll vote with my wallet and you can do the same. Peace.

Ah, the customer is always wrong, and up to them to fix. Certainly what I would do. But it's the principal of the thing. What if it's lost, stolen, breaks, or melts in a fire? Break out the offsite backups! Seriously 3 downloads? Stingy. *edit* Btw I don't see an announcement on denpa's page anywhere or a note on the download limit on the product pages themselves. Don't see an FAQ either. They might want to get on that for the sake of transparency. Still surprised this wasn't about cutting bandwidth costs. I mean they just lost 30K due to steam keys according to them.

I was giving them the benefit of the doubt. I thought they couldn't possibly think this was a good antipiracy idea. So I came up with an alternate theory that at least seemed rationale to me. Especially if the number of downloads was on a cooldown. Assuming that guy really is a representative of denpa they've confirmed both points false. But I'll do you a solid and resist citing moral grounds or resorting to hyperbole. I just won't open an account with Denpa if this is their policy. For one, no one will know what their response time will be like until it happens, not just now, but a years from now. It's like when you upgrade your windows box too many times and you run out of activations. You call up MS. Wait, no. You can't call them. It's done by email. Granted this isn't activation which just makes it more absurd. It's an inconvenience to everybody and is such a superficial fix. Nothing a USB stick or some cloud storage can't bypass. *Note: I'm not condoning it, I'm just pointing out the reality. I know I don't want to be "that" guy at their company. You know the one that has to open all those angry emails, look up their account, and put a bit into the bucket. Form response or no that is at the very least tedious and at the worse stressful. I wouldn't be surprised if he avoided doing the task everyday.

Well, I'm surprised. This is a poor man's DRM that is completely ineffectual. If someone told you that the most common form of pirating is account sharing then they've never heard the saying statistics never lie but liar's use statistics. It's quite possible that any so called account sharing is occurring simply because of poor security practices or breaches at other sites. In which case implementing 2 factor authentication would be more effective.

Hmmm.. yeah I guess it wouldn't work with dating sims or anything using any stat/point system to determining your route. Would it be too meta for them to show the needed values for certain routes? Err... nvm it's not necessarily a distinct A to B path. Certainly a flowchart wouldn't be a good fit. How about an interactive relation? chart? You know how some romance manga will have a page that gives a brief description of each character but also arrows indicating the relationship between each? It could graphically display the status of your relationship with any characters as well as drilling down to a display listing the scenes you've unlocked? The scene icons could be color coded to indicate if you've previously watched a scene on another playthrough vs ones you've never seen. I'm actually envisioning something akin to the diplomacy screen of endless space (I know completely unrelated genre but...). That said you'd have to keep the saves and bookmarking wouldn't really work here. As far as Comyu goes I'm assuming you mean that a game with a greater number of branches would make for a display to crowded to have the additional scene selections? You could always do something similar to what I described above and just have the scene selection appear when you drill/zoom into the space between choices - inter-node if you will. In other words when you're zoomed all the way out all you see is the flowchart showing the choices you've made, you can pan around as needed, and when you want to see scene selections/bookmarks you can mouse wheel in or click on the line connecting two choices. I realize this will probably take extra coding so it might a tough sell, but I think it would be worth it. Especially if you could make it flexible/extensible enough to reuse with other titles.

Sure, under normal usage they should have those costs figured out. But DDOS protection services aren't cheap and if this is a DOS based on abusing their download servers this is a pretty cheap way of denying it. Not that it's good from a PR perspective. That said I agree that some sort of cooldown on downloads would be more effective. For all we know that might be the case? The OP just said there was a number right? Perhaps it refreshes over time? Well it is a low volume business with a limited product line. They have 5-6 games now? Not exactly flush with a constant stream of repeat business. I'd be fine with the change if it is downloads per week/month/etc. Sure, that might have been the original motivation. Hypothetically, once they got the copies they needed and started downloading continuously it would turn into DOS meant to disrupt their business and drive up their costs. My point was that denpa would probably not make the change over a single copy being downloaded. That could have happened at any time amongst any number of users. Lol. I agree. I guess you didn't read my reply above that about this being one of the reasons I don't buy DRM'd games. You're at their mercy for download/activation otherwise.