Formlose Gestalt

I am not qualified to talk about the Japanese VN industry as a whole, but from my limited personal perspective it looks pretty bad. VN developers close down all the time (Light , Propeller , Minori ) or they leave the VN scene to chase the bigger money in the mobile market (Type-Moon , Sprite ) and it is hard to judge how much this void is being filled with newer developers because in the west they only become known after they make a name for themselves. And from a personal perspective, a majority of releases seems to be "moege" and/or nukige which I don't have much interest in, which causes the dead of companies like Light to be amplified tenfold. There aren't that much companies that consistently put out games outside of the moege/charage genre that interested me, like Light or Nitroplus , so every loss is hard. And unfortunately the translations that are released in west seem to mirror the high representation of "moege/charage" and nukige. Obviously I have no insight into the Japanese market and my perception is heavily influenced by my personal taste, but my outlook for the VN industry is pretty pessimistic.

It really pains me to read this. @Conjueror passing away is a real loss for this community. I am going to miss his opinions and reviews on his blog.

Maybe some of the creators of VNs are like me in that they like their stories to have and end? My feeling when looking at manga/LN is often, that a lot of them operate under the principle "Oh the readers like your work; now write/draw it until they don't like it anymore and we can think of an ending then". I at least feel that is one of the biggest advantages of VN, in that they can tell a complete story and be as long as they need to be. In other mediums you would have to split your story in parts. Even a romance VN with multiple heroines would be several books for example.

I think it's a refernce to "Mein Führer", but either way "Mein Waifu" just sounds weird to a native speaker. But I guess for 99% of audience "mein" sounds more German than "meine".

They could at least get the title right... Meine Waifu... Besides that I don't think the world needs this, but oh well...

Yeah my statement is probably to general and this must be decided on a case by case base. But what I meant was that the original developers can make a decent All Age version, while a western publisher cannot really make new scenes (unless the can convince the developer to make for the English market which I doubt) to replace the h-scenes. So If a western publisher decides to make a new All Age release not based on an existing All Age version, they can really only rip out the h-scenes and not much else.

I personally want the h-scenes in because of sheer paranoia. I don't read eroge because of the ero part, I don't really enjoy them to be honest. Most of them feel shoe-horned in just like you said, but I would rather sit through them, then have the publisher cut them out because they deem them inappropriate. I lively through to bullshit already, in Germany for years every fucking movie and videogame had to be cut because of the violence. So I would rather have everything in even if I don't enjoy it. I can always skip if I feel like it. But having it cut out and not knowing what I miss, feels terrible at least for me. But lately I have come around to accepting the Japanese All Age versions of eroge (made by the developers of the 18+ version), at least in that case I can expect that they put thought into replacing those scenes and making sure that everything makes sense afterward. But I will remain critical of All Age version that are produced by western publisher just because they don't want the h-scenes.

I didn't know that such abominations exist... And while I usually don't care what people spend their money on, I feel a sudden urge to punch the people that spend money on this garbage and further fuel this exploitative industry. Also sorry for the OT. I am sure Kenshin_sama didn't have that in mind when proposing the idea.

I think one problem of VN is the ero-part. A lot of people are less willing to spend money on their erotica. It is still stigmatized and the internet is full of "free" porn. And when VNs are associated with porn there is more of a hurdle to buy it. At least I think that is part of the reason for piracy of VNs. Normalizing VN by putting them on Platform like Steam or GOG is good thing in that regard, but well that is obviously not a path for every VN and there is resistance from the store fronts.

Maybe you are right. I never pay much attention to those tags. In the end the question if those VNs count as moege or not isn't really relevant to me. It's only interesting to know if Mangagamer counts those as moege, or if we can/must expect ("another") moege announcement this year. ^^

Nope I didn't play any of those titles, maybe they are more heavy on h-scenes I don't know, but they look like moege to me. But they could be treading the line between moege and nukige. Since moege is a rather vague term and the border to nukige can be rather fluent.

I would say that - Nyan Cafe Macchiato - Wan Nyan ☆ A La Mode! - Uchi no Kanojo all qualify as moege. At least in my book...

Even though they haven't put it up on their blog yet, I think they said that they would be at Anime NYC, so there is the possibility that they announce a yuri title then?

As expected they announced non of the titles that I truly hope for, but with Sakura no Mori † Dreamers they announced the only Moonstone title that looks interesting so there is at least something for me. Yay! Here is the Opening: But they still haven't announced the title that Conjueror & Gare work on so I am curios about that.

The panel is only a few short hours away, but due to time zones I am unfortunately going to miss the announcement. It's a bit sad that I am going to miss the glorious moment when they announce: - Evolimit - Bullet Butlers - Dungeons & Daimeiwaku -Great Edges in the Abyss- - Shunkyoku no Tyrhhia ~What a Beautiful Dawn~ - Alpha Nighthawk (Maybe they save 2 of those for next year.) But tomorrow I am going to update the opening post and celebrate all of them... Have fun with the announcements! (Honestly I just don't want to stay up until 3 am for some new Nukige and Moege.) EDIT: There is an actual useful information that I just found. On Discord they said that https://twitter.com/Hainiryuun is going to livestream the Mangagamer panel.