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BunnyAdvocate

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BunnyAdvocate last won the day on March 11 2019

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  1. If the quote “our language is the reflection of ourselves” is true, then what could we learn from Steam user reviews (other than that we deserve every bad game ever published there)? I thought it’d be fun to generate some word clouds of Steam VN user reviews: what words tend to pop up in positive reviews vs negative ones, which words are overused in 18+ VNs, and how old can I make myself feel by seeing all these memes references. Data collection Using the Steam API, I collected the English user reviews for any VN released before 2019 on Steam, giving us 250,000 reviews in total. I filtered out Doki Doki Literature Club’s 71,000 reviews to prevent the results being skewed too heavily towards one VN. I also filtered out any word that appeared in fewer than 5 different VNs to prevent character names from popular VNs from filling up the results too much. Word associations A higher resolution set of these word-cloud images can be found here. The larger a word is the more frequently it’s used. First up is a comparison of what words tend to appear more often in VN reviews vs a random selection of other games on Steam. There’s nothing too surprising here, it’s mostly just popular VN series and various “weeaboo” terms. “Uncensored” also pops up quite prominently, showing how much 18+ content matters to the medium. Next is the list of words that are more likely to come up in reviews the user submitted as a thumbs-up (a positive review). While there’s all the usual flattering terms you’d expect, it’s fun to see how many words traditionally associated with negative feelings come up here: tears, cry, sadness, and bittersweet all show up indicating how much we seek a deep emotional release in VNs... also “memes.” What goes up must come down, here we have words that tend to come up in thumbs-down Steam reviews. Despite VNs being a visual medium, almost all the terms would seem to describe their opinion on the story/writing rather than the visuals, with “boring,” “waste,” and “stupid” all coming up more often than “ugly.” This suggests the most common way a VN can disappoint its users ie through its writing rather than its aesthetic, although this may because it’s easier to judge the visuals from screenshots before you purchase the VN. The English-developed VNs reviews are mostly full of titles of popular EVNs, but we can also see how much more socially progressive EVNs are, with terms like gender, diversity, and lgbt coming up more often than in JVNs. Truly Japan is the land of wonder, or at least kawaii catgirls according to these results. It’s curious that “fighting” would be linked to JVNs, perhaps because there’s so few EVNs that depict violence. Thank you Steam reviews for telling us in the review that a free VN is free. Truly a valuable service. There’s a certain irony that the words that come up more often in commercial VNs are all about how to get it cheaper: sale, bundle, and discount are all prominent terms. These are the words that tend to come up more often in otome VNs reviews (VNs with a female protagonist pursuing male love interests). Words associated with fantasy type settings pop up frequently, queen, princess, and prince are all present which is unsurprising given otome’s love of the fantasy genre. These are the cursed words which come up more often in 18+ VNs, what is lacking in eloquence is at least made up in “tiddies.” These are the words that tend to come up in shorter reviews. We’re told a picture paints a thousand words, but who needs a thousand words when you have swear words to convey meaning instead? Who needs verbose reviews when you have “fuck gay catgirl boobs.” I’m sold on that VN already. You can find higher resolution versions of all these word cloud images here (as well as the longer-review wordcloud which wasn’t included here because it’s boring). You can also view the results in spreadsheet format here, which is useful for reading the smaller (less-common) words. Review trends I’d be ashamed to put my name to an analysis post that didn’t have a graph or two, so to cleanse the palette after all those word clouds here are a few graphs looking at some review statistics. Typically reviews tend to be fairly short, just a few sentences at 150 characters, but there’s no stopping the more long-winded of us who might be few in number, but dramatically pull up the average wordcount with their detailed account of everything that happens in a VN. I expected that the longer a review was, the more likely it would be that the reviewer liked it. It’s the fans who want to talk about it the most isn’t it? Well it turns out to be the other way around, the longer a review is, the more likely it is that the reviewer disliked it. Perhaps unhappy user’s feel the need to justify their opinion more when it goes against the general positive consensus on Steam, where 86% of all reviews are positive. So in accordance with this trend and the excessive length of this post, I hereby give my Steam VN review analysis a thumbs down. Not enough kawaii catgirls. While I don’t think any of these results were surprising, I hope you found it a fun read. If you’re interested in more, check out my other posts on tumblr. Feel free to give any feedback or suggestions for other analyses either here, twitter, or Discord (Sunleaf_Willow /(^ n ^=)\#1616). Thanks to Lunaterra, /u/8cccc9, and Elm for their input during this analysis.
  2. The results of the poll and the suggestions from the community are now up here! Thank you to everyone who voted or offered ideas to add to our list! I hope you had fun with the poll and see a few new VNs you might be interested in this winter season~
  3. Higurashi Rei came out after the original 8 arcs and is split into 3 stories, the first two are just comedic and aren't translated (although you can watch the anime versions with subtitles), but the third one has a fan translation and is well worth reading, especially if you go on to read Umineko as it explains the background of a certain character that reappears there. You can get the patch via vndb here: https://vndb.org/r9207
  4. The connection between the sites is a little complicated, they aren't officially linked yet. fuwanovel.se was initially organised by @Palas along with a few other regulars here on the fuwa forums (me, @MaggieROBOT, @lunaterra, @Emi, and a few others - sorry for not mentioning everyone). Emi is currently paying for the hosting and is in the process of taking ownership of the old fuwanovel.net site so they can revive it, at which point the sites will probably be merged, but it's taking a while to get final approval. We'll keep Symphonic Rain in mind thanks, although I think with all the rainy weather in it I might associate more with early spring. But I'll mention it to the others. Generally we were looking for "cosy" VNs so that tended to mostly just leave us with romance/drama oriented stories, but we opened up the list a little bit to just good VNs to read during winter, so yeah Swan Song would be great. The poll is now live here.
  5. Our poll on the best VNs to read during winter just went up here if anyone wants to vote~ Thank you to everyone who offered suggestions! We've kept note of all the suggestions and those who didn't make it onto the poll are very likely to make it onto our recommendation list that we'll be posting next week alongside the poll results. We're still accepting suggestions for the recommendation list if anyone has any other VNs you think are great for winter.
  6. @littleshogun Ah True Remembrance is perfect, a cute little heartwarming story set during winter~ I've not read DC2 but I'll check it out for the list thanks!
  7. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out. Oh it'd be great to have a few otomes on the list too. I'm not sure if we have any yet. Although I'm not sure yet if we want to cover fan discs as we were hoping the results would serve as a list of recommendations for those who hadn't read a lot. But I'll note it down to check out thanks!
  8. Haha yeah, Swan Song was the first I thought of with the winter theme. Just thinking about that VN makes me cold. We thought it'd be more interesting to narrow down the category a little bit for the poll though. Six Days of Snow is a little borderline on the heartwarming element yeah, but there is a strong theme of understanding others so it definitely seems like a contender. Oh I should have specified that we're mostly after translated VNs, as the site is primarily for recommending VNs to English speakers, but Kanon is a good pick and I'll keep the others noted down for if we include an untranslated section in the curated list with the results. Thanks! Added to the list~ Yeah the only heartwarming element is the rage over wanting to smack Yuni to get him to tell us what he knows! Ah thanks for the suggestions. Snow Sakura should definitely make it, but S;G 0 might be a bit of a maybe depending upon what else is on our list. I'll also add the other 3 suggestions you added later.
  9. I suppose the poll doesn't necessarily need to all be great VNs, we'll need something to end up at the bottom of the poll result. But yeah it'll be better if we have more higher rated contenders to choose between.
  10. @Plk_Lesiak Oh I'd been thinking of A Winter's Datdream too. I hadn't heard of Wolf Tails before, that looks like it might be "warming" something other than the heart, but I'll add it to the list so it should find a spot either on the poll or part of the other suggestions posted alongside the poll results. Sakura Santa might actually be worth adding. I've not read the Sakura VNs, but they seem to sell well so presumably they have a fair size fanbase, so it might be worth an inclusion on the poll?
  11. We're going to be running a poll on http://fuwanovel.se/ next week on the best VNs to read on a cold winter day, much like the one we did on Halloween VNs. Anything with a cold setting and a heartwarming storyline. If you have any VN suggestions to add to the list please let me know! Not every VN will make it onto the poll, but we'll also have a curated list of community suggestions listed with the poll results.
  12. The results of our Halloween poll are up! The top 10 voted spooky VNs are up here along with our VN recommendations that range from the comedic to the existential-angst inducing~ Thank you to everyone who took part in the poll, and thank you for all your suggestions! We didn't manage to squeeze in all of them, but we tried to include at least one suggestion from everyone who recommended some.
  13. Ah thanks, I'll add it to the list of contenders.
  14. Yeah I found KQ quite disappointing. After spending the intro explaining all these elaborate rules and complex individual objective system, it just basically throws it all away. It could have been really good. I've heard the remake Secret Game is much better in that regard, but I've not read it. Ah thanks, I'll add it to the list of contenders.
  15. Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not sure yet how much of an untranslated section we'll have, but I'll keep Sayonara o Oshiete in mind if we do. Killer Queen was a pretty fun Battle Royale, I just wish the improved remake Secret Game got a translation.
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