Akshay

Welcome to Fuwa~

ISLAND
VNDB: https://vndb.org/v18498
BUY on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/857450/ISLAND/
 
Summary
Urashima is a small island, far from mainland Japan. It’s a true utopia, blessed with rich natural beauty. But the island harbours a difficult past, and it’s about to be erased, silently, from history.

Soot blight syndrome, an endemic disease, has brought about a rift between the island and the mainland. An offshore platform intended for marine research has long been left abandoned; five years ago, three separate incidents brought the once influential Three Families of Urashima to near ruin. Rumours about children being spirited away have become part of the local folklore, alongside another legend, one that has been repeated on the island since time immemorial...

“Let me tell you the legend of this island: it’s a story of tragic love...”

The key to saving the island lies with three girls, each of whom belongs to one of the Three Families. These girls aren’t able to change the fate of the island by themselves, but might they succeed with the help of the young man who’s just washed ashore? Claiming that he’s traveled back in time, the man immediately sets out on a lonely path, challenging the long-standing traditions of the island, and seeking to change the future. But those aren’t his only goals...

How will his presence transform the lives of these three girls, the future of the island, and the fate of the world...?

[From official website]
About "Island"
Similar to G.O.'s previous works (Himawari), Island is a science fiction multiple route mystery with a fixed progression order. Your own enjoyment from the game will greatly depend whether you're capable of piecing together the presented fragments on the way to discover the truth. Despite being an all-ages title, Island is choke heavy on sexual humor (called shimoneta in japanese) and adult themes, including sexual content; explicit erotic content is simply not shown on-screen. Story discusses topics such as death and rebirth, loss of beloved ones, family, personal responsibility and a variety of science fiction related subjects - with time travel and many-worlds interpretation amongst few - but also astrophysics, genetics, spirituality, philosophy, human psychology and history of mankind. Most of the topics are entry-level, making Island a perfect choice for beginners willing to delve deeper into more complicated visual novels.
General Info
It is possible to actually chose between Karen and Sara during your initial playthrough, but I highly advise to chose Karen first, since her route acts as a natural introduction to the setting, without being as convoluted or cryptic as Sara's.
Island contains many alternate endings (The so called BAD ENDS, although only few of them are tragic), with vast majority being story-based (non "game over" screens, where the protagonist typically just dies). Those endings need to be cleared in order to progress the story beyond certain points.
The overall recommended progression order is as follows:
SUMMER [Karen (restart) -> Sara (restart) -> Rinne] -> WINTER -> MIDSUMMER [Rinne End -> True End]
This guide follows the above mentioned order, unlocking all the content along the way.
Endings
Aside from four main endings (Karen, Sara, Rinne and True End), there are total thirteen alternate endings available in-game (twelve for the SUMMER and one for the MIDSUMMER). You will see them all in a fixed order, provided you follow this guide. Names for the BAD ENDINGS are as follows (within their chronological order):
Walkthrough
Guide:
All the saves are meant to be done during choices. The total number of saves used in this guide equals 16 and allows you to 100% clear the entire game. Save states in red are meant only for collecting BAD ENDS. You can skip those, if you prefer the trial & error approach. Regardless, this guide always assumes you have them cleared whenever required. Save states in blue are used for progression and remain the only ones you should be concerned about in general. We will be using those to jump quickly to required scenes without being forced to continously repeat large portions of the story. "Your choice" describes so called "flavour choices"; no matter the decision, they always lead to same exact outcome so pick whichever you like the most. Answers are merely kept to ease guidance. If you're lost or unsure, don't forget about the in-game flowchart! You can access it any time from the In-game menu and it can also be used to jump between already cleared scenes, similar to loading save states. Use it often! SUMMER

KAREN

SARA

RINNE

WINTER
MIDSUMMER

RINNE'S END

RE: (TRUE END)
BAD ENDINGS
Attribution
This guide was made thanks to the walkthrough available on Seiya-Saiga repository. All rights go to their respective owners. Everything else was done by le watakushi. If you'd like the high-res version of the title banner, PM me.
Changelog
28/08/2019 - Rewrote certain parts of the guide for better workflow and fixed an inconsistency with Common/Summer route, which also made me partially omit one of the bad endings.
05/10/2018 - True end retrieved it's original name
09/09/2018 - Initial release

Seiya Saiga has one that covers everything nicely. I remember there's another one already available on Steam as well.
I was actually considering creating a slightly expanded version for Fuwanovel.

I’ve recently read a few thoughtful discussion threads on the state of the VN market here in the West. Some taking a negative stance, some with a more positive outlook. I thought I’d try to put some numbers on these statements and look at VN ownership on Steam, still the predominant market for PC games, and use that to analyse whether VNs are on their true route or have stumbled into a bad end.

Data collection
I checked just over a million steam profiles to try and get a random sample of gamers. With Steam’s new private-by-default profile settings, only 8% of those users had public game lists, but that still gave us 80k user profiles to work with. I could then compare my sample with the “leaked” owner data and scale up my numbers accordingly to represent Steam as a whole.
Steam is rather haphazard with what gets tagged as a Visual Novel (RPGMaker games like A Bird Story are tagged as VNs), so I’ll only be including games that also have a VNDB entry.

Steam VN releases
So let’s start simple, with a simple plot of how many VNs are being released each month.

 
At first glance things seem rosy for VN fans, there have never been more VNs being released in the West. But let’s break down those results a bit:

Note that these trends are cumulative but NOT stacked. The EVN, JVN, and other VNs trends include only non-free VNs.
Here we can start to see the reason for the differing perspectives on the state of the VN market depending upon whether you read more JVNs or EVNs. While the rate of EVNs releases has steadily increased, the number of new JVNs has remained fairly static since 2016, despite Steam’s lowered release requirements. Steady release rates aren’t definitely bad news, but in general profitable industries want to expand, so the lack of expansion tells you something about the industry. But as someone with a plan-to-read list that grows longer by the day, I’m not complaining if the rate doesn’t increase.
One under-reported development in the VN market is the recent rapid growth of Chinese VNs (listed as other here), who have quietly been doing well in their home markets, but are rarely translated.
So while more VNs might be good for us fans, how does the market look for developers? Let’s have a look at VN sales.

Note that these trends are cumulative but NOT stacked. All sales are back-dated to the release date of the VN on Steam. Free VNs count sales as the number of users who have logged some playtime in it.
Unfortunately Steam’s API doesn’t list when someone bought a game, so we’ve got to group sales by the release date of the VN. That means there will be a bias towards older releases which have been out longer and so had more time to build up sales.
Here we can see some justification for the doom and gloom perspectives, with more recent VN releases selling significantly less than older ones. With new JVNs in 2017 selling only half what they did in 2016. The EVN downward trend is especially stark given that the number of new releases has been increasing, so that’s less revenue split among even more VNs.
Not all VNs are equal, some are priced higher, so let’s look at total revenue rather than total sales.

Note that this assumes every user pays full price, so this is more the maximum possible revenue than actual revenue.
Here we can see the difference between EVN and JVN markets. While JVNs sell only half as many as EVNs, they earn almost as much revenue due to their higher price. We again see the same dip in more recent revenue though, 2017 was only 46% of 2016′s revenue, and 2018 looks even worse so far.
Remember, this fall in revenue coincidences with an increase in the total number of releases, so to fully comprehend the drop on revenue, let’s look at the average sales per VN.

 
First, we should note that this massively overestimates the average revenue generated as it assumes every user pays full price. I know devs who would sell their soul for 282k per VN. Oh wait, they already did when they signed up for Steam... (just kidding, I do like Steam, but it has issues). The important aspect here isn’t the y-axis total which is unreliable, but the consistent downwards trend.
But it might not be as bleak as it seems, older VNs are more likely to have been in bundles and in Steam sales, so their revenue is likely overestimated compared with more recent releases. So I’d be hesitant to claim that revenue is necessarily dropping, but I think we can confidently claim that revenue isn’t increasing.

VN Reviews
Nostalgia for a past golden age is common everywhere, not least among VN fans. It’s not uncommon to hear that newly released VNs aren’t as good as older ones, but can we get any empirical data on this point? We can get close by looking at the Steam reviews of VNs over time.

Each dot represents the average thumbs up/down ratio for any VNs released that month.
Within the JVN market, we can see some truth to the nostalgia viewpoint. Older releases were more consistently rated higher. But that isn’t to say there aren’t new highly rated JVNs. They still maintain enviously high scores overall.
As for EVNs, while they had consistently scored lower than JVNs, they’re catching up and are now pretty comparable in review ratings of JVNs.
Just for fun, let’s see how the total review count compares between VNs.

The two free-VN spikes are for Emily is Away and DDLC.
As I’m sure anyone familiar with the VN community can tell you, JVN fans are vocal, and it shows in the total reviews VNs get. Despite there being only half as many JVNs as EVNs, they still attract more reviews than EVNs do. This is perhaps because JVNs are typically far longer than EVNs, so might be worth the time of writing a review.
What free-VN fans lack in the wallet, they make up for in their word-count. Although this is massively skewed by two free VNs which compromise 70% of all free-VN reviews: Emily is Away and DDLC. They seem anomalies rather than trends. As shown by the graph when we exclude those two:

*Excluding Emily is Away and DDLC.
Despite the drop in position, free-VNs still out-perform what we’d expect given their lower count of total owners, but that may be because EVN and JVN totals include users who own the VN but have never read it. Whereas the free-VN total only includes those who have logged playtime in that VN, so there’s a larger pool of possible reviewers.

Potential Issues
There are a few sources of uncertainty in the dataset. The selection of users who have set their profiles to public might not be representative of the wider Steam userbase. It probably undercounts more casual fans who are less likely to configure their Steam profile.
We also don’t know when someone purchased a VN, so it’s possible VN sales are increasing, but a lot of that money is going to older releases, especially if they’re in bundles and Steam sales.
In inclusion of VNs in game bundles may be distorting the image of the VN fandom, as it’ll include those who have little interest in the medium and only own a VN by happenstance.
We should also remember that “Steam” is not synonymous with the VN market. There are plenty of competitors in the VN scene, namely Mangagamer and itch.io, who tend to cater to different tastes than Steam does. So we’re only getting a partial picture of the Western VN scene.

Conclusion
There’s data here to support both the optimistic and pessimistic commentary. On the positive side, there have never been more VNs being released as there are now. EVNs are improving with higher average ratings and a few have reached mainstream attention.
On the pessimistic side, it seems like there are ever more VNs competing for a fanbase that isn’t significantly growing. While I’d be wary of claiming profits are falling, it seems highly likely they aren’t increasing, and a stagnant market is not a healthy one.
Personally, I think the future is bright. While VNs might not be destined to become blockbuster successes, there is enough of sustainable fanbase to support lots of indie developers, who are the most prone to innovate and write interesting new stories. As a VN fan, I’m excited to see what comes next~
---
I hope you found the article interesting. I had wanted to include a section analysing the Steam users, how many VNs do JVN fans purchase compared to EVN fans etc. But I want to spend a little longer going into more depth on it, so I’ll have a post up next week on that. If you’re interested in more until then, check out my other tumblr analysis posts, look out for updates on my twitter, or give me a yell on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616). Special thanks to /u/8cccc9 for collaborating on the analysis, and Part-time Storier for proof-reading.
I just do these analyses for fun, but if you want to support my work with a tip, I accept small donations at ko-fi.

So as said in the title, this list is more of a reflection of my top 40 favorite H-scenes cuz there's no way in hell I'm ranking all 300+ H scenes I've likely seen at this point in one list.
If you want to know all the characters/visual novels on this list:
Top Row to Bottom Row, Left to Right
* Ageha from Konosora/If My Heart Had Wings - https://vndb.org/c9334 , Yukie from MajiKoiS - https://vndb.org/c3511 
* Yorihime from Magical Marriage Lunatics - https://vndb.org/c14902, Mizuha from G-senjou - https://vndb.org/c400, Ritsuko from Princess Evangile W Happiness - https://vndb.org/c3105, Komomo from Hoshizora no Memoria - https://vndb.org/c3932
* Sakura from Fate/Stay Night - https://vndb.org/c35, Rio from Dracu-Riot - https://vndb.org/c5027, Asuho from Hoshizora no Memoria - https://vndb.org/c3910, Ema from Fashioning Little Miss Lonesome - https://vndb.org/c43353, Haruko from Haruko Maniax - https://vndb.org/c172, Touka from Sharin no Kuni - https://vndb.org/c506, Benio from Comyu - https://vndb.org/c1587
* Sawatari from Fureraba - https://vndb.org/c16558
* Hibari from Swan Song - https://vndb.org/c3992, Rina from Fureraba - https://vndb.org/c16555, Kanon from G-senjou - https://vndb.org/c399, Mizuki from Edelweiss - https://vndb.org/c339, Himeno from Da Capo III - https://vndb.org/c5312, Hibiki from Maitetsu - https://vndb.org/c39200
* Kei from Dies Irae - https://vndb.org/c28991, Nekoko from Yume Miru Kusuri - https://vndb.org/c1632, Riho from Deardrops - https://vndb.org/c5243, Chizuru from Labyrinth of Grisaia - https://vndb.org/c578
* Ruriko from Princess Evangile W Happiness - https://vndb.org/c3109
* Natsumi from Sharin no Kuni fandisc - https://vndb.org/c506, Muana from Sharin no Kuni fandisc - https://vndb.org/c15692, Elina from Dracu-Riot - https://vndb.org/c5028
* Kotori from Konosora/If My Heart Had Wings - https://vndb.org/c9333
* Ayumi from Kotori Love Ex P - https://vndb.org/c7545, Benkei from MajiKoi A-1 - https://vndb.org/c5868, Tomoyo from Tomoyo After - https://vndb.org/c45746, Ririko from Sharin no Kuni fandisc - https://vndb.org/c1375, Sachi from Fruit of Grisaia - https://vndb.org/c576, Renna from Tsujidou-san no Junai Road - https://vndb.org/c5399
* Umi from Koirizo - https://vndb.org/c14219
* Rise from Princess Evangile - https://vndb.org/c3104, Ayumi from Kotori Love Ex P - https://vndb.org/c7545, Yayoi from Deardrops - https://vndb.org/c5242, Ami from MajiKoi S - https://vndb.org/c9798
You may have noticed this tier list style is slightly different from the S through F that most people use. If you want this style, go to this site - http://www.mmcafe.com/tiermaker/dbfz/index_customize.html.
This'll probably the last time I post a public EOP tier list like this since the VNs are comin in slower. 
This month, I plan on starting on learning Japanese. So don't be surprised if a JOP tier list comes eventually, but not for a while.

Some of my english visual novels

More of my english visual novels

Grisaia complete box

English visual novels with NSFW cover
 
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

I know Neptunia is not quite defined as a VN, though it does have long VN segments and I just wanted to add it here at the end

 
As you can see I have quite a lot.

I have played nekopara 8 times already. This isn't counting the time I open it to virtually pet my favorite Nekos.

I knew that recently we got so many worrying news in regard of Sakura Games, and to rub the salt in the wound MoeNovel/Pulltop decided to join the fun. So in order to dilute the anger, let's see what NekoNyan did tweet below (And to see of how cute Tsumugi was XD).
As for announcement, we obviously still won't know what it is until the announcement. But apparently they decided to split it because apparently there'll be a lot to share, so I'm gonna look forward to this. Feel free to write what you think here.
Announcement 1 (8/30) - Hello Lady!

Many problems lie ahead for society in the 21st century. The best youths in the country are gathered at the super-elite Amakawa Noble School where they are trained to lead us to a brilliant future. They are led by five bishoujos known as ‘crowns’. One day, the leader of the crowns Saku was the target of a terrorist attack. She was saved by Shinri, who was invited to the school as the sixth crown. However, he is at odds with the school system. He vowed to do things under his accord and bring change to the school. Saku decided that she must keep an eye on him.
Announcement 2 (8/31) - Aokana

In a world where flying is as simple as riding a bicycle, there is a popular sport called “Flying Circus.”

The protagonist once had a bright future ahead of him in that field of sports but due to an overwhelming defeat in addition to a certain other reason, he has left that field. 

However, he meets the transfer student Kurashina Asuka and regains his passion as he teaches her how to fly.

With his situation changed, he participates once again in the Flying Circus. Just how high will he be able to fly this time with Asuka at his side?

This is a love story about the two who met while soaring in the skies, and the friends surrounding them.

I have played nekopara 8 times already. This isn't counting the time I open it to virtually pet my favorite Nekos.

I don't know any japanese, and have no clue how to start a TL project. From what I've seen they are usually centered around the translater want . Also I think @Dergonu will TL it at some point.

Shiniyuku Kimi, Yakata ni Mebuku Zouo
Terrible things happens to the female protagonist, and she's made to experience them over and over again with full memories of them.
Minikui Mojika no Ko
Dark sexual torture VN which is apparently very difficult to stomach (I had not actually read it though)
 
Edited: ops, forgot you (most probably) only read english releases
Anyway, ignore the above recommendations (or you can keep it in mind references, lol)

Hmm... These two are the only ones that comes to mind whenever I think of psychological horror of some kind...
Wonderful Everyday
Divi-Dead