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Plk_Lesiak

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Everything posted by Plk_Lesiak

  1. I appreciate the puns, even if they are a bit crappy. The offer is a serious one though, including the possibility of payment. :]
  2. Hello there! I was recently going through a major number of notoriously bad VNs and came up with an idea for a new segment for the blog, focused solely on said shovelware. As the games in question are not really worth of formal reviews, I've decided to create a separate format and separate rating system for those. For that reason, I'm in need of three original, cartoonish graphics representing the three possible ratings: 1. Smelly Poo (It stinks!) - for those really shitty, gross VNs with little or no redeeming qualities 2. Rabbit Poo (Better just ignore it...) - for those VNs that are just of poor quality, but don't stand out very much in any way 3. Golden Poo. Shiny! (But the smells is pretty bad...) - for VNs that are definitely still bad, but have some kind of charm or strong elements that make them amusing and possibly worth experiencing by yourself In my vision, the ratings would be represented by round badges, featuring the name of the rating as listed above (probably the name of the badge in the upper part and the description in the bottom part), along with an appropriate illustration. I'll be willing to pay for it, if someone's willing to make it in an appropriately decent quality. :3 Where the fuck do I get these ideas from? :s
  3. Don't worry, while Turkey has some particularly shitty policies when it goes to Armenian Genocide denial, nearly every country has a lot of nasty shit in their history and the nationalist propaganda tries to erase all those events or shift the blame onto others. Don't ever let them convince that you're in the wrong for acknowledging these facts and being able to look at your own country with a critical eye. That makes you a decent, open-minded person, not a "traitor".
  4. Tsukihime black, although it's kind of counter-productive, I've just got bored of the default one so much that I had to switch it to something else.
  5. I've been going through playthroughs of various bad OELVNs on YouTube (it makes it possible to avoid giving money to bad devs, among other upsides like not being bound to my PC while watching them :p), including some Winged Cloud games and I'm actually quite disturbed by how they've just gone shittier and lazier as time went on... The short, free Sakura games are the absolute crap as expected, but I think the "mainline", commercial ones are also becoming even more uninspired and shittily made. And I'm not even sure If I can blame that on the company, it's pretty clear that after investing more money and effort into Dungeon and Fantasy they realized that making the bare-minimum-effort ecchi trash is more profitable. People really should have a bit more respect for themselves, even when looking for fap material. I have to give a shoutout to Bosskwar though, who makes these games more fun than they have any right to be. And help me not spend money on stuff that I want to check out, but know that the devs behind it are not worth supporting.
  6. You didn't really tell us much about the game and I usually don't touch unfinished ones unless I'm really motivated. So, unless we're meant to comment solely on screenshots (which look fine, I guess?) there's indeed not much feedback to be given.
  7. Well, I would agree and disagree, actually translating game machanics into a fully interactable world is a challenge - making a "gamey" setting that works requires a lot of imagination and careful development, SAO is quite a good example of getting it mostly right, with creating a vision of full-immersion VR game that feels more or less credible. It is used lazily, but most storytelling techniques can be shitty in the hands of a shitty/lazy writer.
  8. Really? You skip the part where "undercover" Russian troops invaded Crimea in mass? Also I like how snipers gunning people on the streets during the protests is "someone got shot". The uprising was, to a degree, the fault of Ukrainian politicians who miguidedly pushed nationalistic agenda, but it would possibly not even happen in a scale comparable to what actually happened without the (extremely thinly disguised) Russian military intervention. And Svoboda doesn't rule Ukraine, no one would blindly launch nukes against Russia, unless maybe when responding to a direct agression - but that's the point, Russia wouldn't dare to do the thing it did if Ukraine had those. Lol, whut? Gaddafi was responding to a mass revolt - obviously he was a particularly brutal dictator, but I really like the notion that he arbitraly decided to raze a city on a whim (and the fact he sent troops means he wanted to kill everyone in Bengazi? How does that work?). And I agree with France and other European countries spearheading the effort to topple him - it's unclear whether they would intervene without American support though and the fact that the current leader of Libyan secularists, general Haftar lived for 20+ years in US and everyone pretty much considers him a CIA agent is not a coincidence. Libya is an American mess too and even if you argue that intervention against Gaddafi was necessary, you can't possibly say it was well-executed (or that it would happen if the regime had means to defend itself from foreign invasion). During Gaddafis rule the country had one of the highest living standards in all Africa, now it's a jihadist-ridden ruin.
  9. Fairy Dance arc is pure cancer, I liked every other part of SAO though (and yeah, by the second season I meant the actual second season, starting with the GGO story - for some reason I've seen tons of people hating it with a passion). :>
  10. I just wanted to thank @Thyndd and @Kurisu-Chan for making me realize I'm not the only one that hated Subaru's character development in Re:ZERO. I'm no longer alone in this world. :') I've liked the second season of SAO though, so I guess I'll forever stay a pariah...
  11. Hello there you cute little things! The post will be short this time, because I'm tired and burned out AF, both from the VN stuff and the RL business I have to deal with lately. But, enough negativity, it's a happy day today! Another interview has arrived and I'm really happy with this one - @ds-sans is not only a dev whose work I thoroughly enjoy but also proved a great partner for a conversation about everything VN. I really encourage you to check out the post, unless you're completely disinterested in the OELVN scene and development, it should prove enjoyable for you. I've also published a short review of his freeware title, Sounds of Her Love - a really lovely, small romance VN - feel encouraged to check that post too, it should also provide you with some context for the interview if you're not familiar with ds-sans' work. And for now, this is all. Next week, I'll provide you with one more yuri-esque VN review and after that, the gameplay VN month is coming - and it should be a lot, a lot of fun. :3 Have a great week everyone!
  12. Yeah, that's why I enjoy most isekai stuff even though it's usually shit. I have to agree with @Kurisu-Chan though, writing in many isekai LNs and Anime is pathetic. I recently realised that when I reached past mid-season of Deathmarch, it started with a fun gimmick and a protagonist apparently completely disinterested in being a hero... And then made him do pointless heroics all the time. After all, God forbids something actually interesting or morally ambiguous happen in such a show...
  13. In March I've brought you two interviews with notable yuri and otome OELVN developers, talking with Nami and Reine Works' founder, Jackie M. Today, however, we're venturing into the world of very, very traditional romance (with equally high levels of cuteness), as my guest is ds-sans, the author of a lovely freeware VN Sounds of Her Love (be sure to check my review of that game) and the upcoming commercial title Chemically Bonded. I encourage you to join us as we discuss the place of all-ages romance in the VN scene, the role of voice acting in OELVNs and more. Plk_Lesiak: Welcome and thank you for accepting my invitation! While many people in the VN community might recognize your nick, they probably don’t know much beyond that. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? ds-sans: I wouldn't really say that I'm that interesting. I'm currently an undergraduate student at university in the UK studying geography, with an interest in anime and related media in my spare time. (Although, that's died down in recent years.) If I were to describe my current background, it'd be fairly cliché, just like the stories of my VNs. I started developing VNs in 2015, while I was 16, but really showed an interest in January 2014. I didn't make it that far though and only really came back to it to prove that I could do something if I tried. PL: Sooo... Where did the "ds-sans" label come from? ds: In all honesty, I don't think the name really means anything. From what I remember, I think I honestly scrambled a few letters together from a car's registration plate, but this was a good 4 years ago. To clarify though, it has nothing to do with Japanese honorifics at least. I'd only started getting into anime a few months prior and still had no clue as to their usage. The story itself isn't that special, but the name stuck and at this point, I feel that it's too late to change it. PL: You create rather tame, cute romances in a market that seem to reward ecchi and h-content over anything else. Why this formula? ds: Pure romance novels have always been very diverse in the EVN industry, in my opinion. From what I've personally seen, many of the tamer romance titles are either a lot more Western in style or are low-scale non-commercial in nature and target a different audience. As far as I'm aware, there are relatively few commercial B x G titles with no 18+ content which take significant influence from Japanese VNs. Reading Clannad was really influential in my decision to focus on cute romance stories as I wanted to emphasize emotional connections between people over physical. If I were to add scenes like that into the stories, they'd need to supplement that motive as opposed to attracting more sales or getting people off. Katawa Shoujo is a good example of a VN which does h-scenes in this way. It's the formula which my inspiration is driven from, but it's not as if I'm not open to expanding into different genres for different audiences in the future. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  14. Check out my interview with the developer of this game, ds-sans! Is there any merit to creating a tame, single-heroine romance VN in a market that seems to be flooded with cute love stories, often in much more "advanced" forms? Do a romance VN need to invent something fresh and original to be successful? Is it even possible to be innovative much in the world of cute romance tales, with the kind of saturation the genre offers? Sounds of Her Love, a small freeware title published over a year ago by DEVGRU-P and created by ds-sans, an indie developer then pretty much unknown to the VN community, made me think about all these issues in a fairly substantial manner. And the answer it suggested to me, both due to my personal enjoyment and the warm reception it received from other readers, was: when making a romance story in the visual novel format, you don't have to create anything particularly new, as long as you do the basics really, really well. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com
  15. Yeah, but I also don't think that experience alone can make someone a good critic or their opinions reasonable, even beyond the fact that we all have our subjective preferences - you can very much be a veteran with a terrible taste or outlandish stances that makes your take on various titles or issues completely useless to an average reader. Also if you stay within a niche community for very long it's often hard to resist groupthink and being apologetic towards the persistent flaws of the genre you're emotionally invested in. So, experience gives you perspective probably necessary to properly judge VNs, but doesn't make your opinions automatically more valid (and if you lack critical distance, it might actually make them conventional and heavily skewed - lacking in different ways than perspective of a newbie, but equally so).
  16. I don't like inventing arbitrary thresholds, but being an active reader for a few years is a must in my perspective, just because of how time-consuming the medium is. If I keep a similar pace as for the last 6-7 months, I will consider myself an experienced reader in two-three years. Considering how much short stuff and tiny OELVNs I consume, I would predict to have easily above 200 finished titles on my VNDB at that point. But numbers mean little, if you count one hour-long games as equal to 50h+ behemoths.
  17. Can we throw you a congratulation party though?
  18. Localization Kickstarters are a bit of a different issue, those are mostly just irritating. Plus I don't how that big of a tendency to empathize with publishing companies, they very rarely deserve it. Horribly misguided original projects however always manage to get me agitated in some way. :s
  19. Confession: Terrible VN Kickstarters makes me strangely sad, and this particular one especially so. I can see how someone put probably dozens upon dozens of hours into a project that ends up looking like a total mess and will fail miserably. It's also a person that came to Fuwa looking for advice, got bashed by me for bad writing and sloppy English, got some advice from others... And now the Kickstarter page looks possibly worse than the prototype we saw earlier. Did we do something wrong? Huh...
  20. I feel exactly the same. What I've heard about the Law Route is pretty much my "storytelling fetish" - I enjoy that kind of "lawful villain/subverting the expectations" fantasies to an unreasonable degree and it is very rarely done in western games... I'm not sure if I've seen a compelling version of it outside of Star Wars: The Old Republic and that game's Sith storylines (I accept recommendations though :p). Plus, if I'm planning to avoid the Chaos route altogether I don't think I have to worry about the censorship that much. I might still download the patch to see the consensual h-scenes (lol, how the contrast with tentacle rape can make those seem like a completely innocent/appealing concept ), but either way there's much less risk of the narrative falling apart than if playing the tentacle rape path without tentacle rape... BTW, thank you once more @assasinzassasin for talking to us, you did a great job explaining the difficulties of this particular localization process and answering all our questions. I will try to promote your crowdfunding in whatever way I can - and I hope we didn't get you in really heavy trouble for revealing all that stuff. ^^
  21. Interesting. How much are you willing to invest in this plan? I'm open for suggestions, if appropriate incentives are attached.
  22. Tilca and Regret when it goes to designs and characteristics. I will keep them pure and lovely, just like they are and rule the world together (or something like that)! Yeah... And if someone told me this morning that I would be super-hyped about a series most well-known for tentacle porn coming to the West, I would be a bit skeptical.
  23. Yes, this is exactly what I wanted to hear. I will have to keep an eye out for the Kickstarter after all.
  24. That's true - I have to know whether I want to buy it first though. My question mostly came from the fact that while I don't mind playing a a villanous protagonist, rape and over-the-top cruelty are definitely not my thing. So I wanted to know how much of that stuff is avoidable in the game's narrative - really, whether I have to see the tentacle hentai is a secondary issue, I could easily suffer through a few of those scenes if it leads somewhere interesting later on. Whether I can stand the protagist or lead him into any kind of "not-total-homicidal-maniac" direction is actualy much more important for me. Thank you for your response though. Edit: I also didn't really expect any changes to the game mechanics to cater to people like me in the Western release, I'm just wondering whether the game is worth following from my partical perspective.
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