1P1A

Either way, you instantly gave me a succinct neurological disorder. Color me impressed.
 

I think you have synesthesia

Confession: I thought those reactions were for when you whip your donger out

Confession: I'm not sure how to interpret any of the smileys we have, but I still use them a lot.

Confession: neither do we 

Anime is trash, and so am I. VNs are lit tho 

VNs have always been and will always be trash tbh 

Of course I have the answer, and it is when I started playing them for the first time. That was the real golden age.
 

Peak, peek, and piqued
I think that's too subjective to determine. When it comes to video games, for example, there are people that would say the 90s-early 2000s were the golden age of RPGs with their isometric views and complex gameplay. At the same time, others say they are complete dogshit and the modern vision of RPGs like Skyrim are much better.
With visual novels specifically I don't think there's any "golden age", especially because technology does not affect VNs very much. Just like with RPGs, some people will idolise older VNs and claim newer stuff is brainless, and some people will prefer the modern art-focused moeges (unless their name is VirginSmasher). Nobody is right, nobody is correct.
For the record, my personal opinion is that all visual novels have been trash thus far.

if anything i am dumber now and starting to enjoy seeing the same 3 stories told over and over

When your waifu cheats on you.
 

Kaoru's route from Ayakashibito.

When your waifu cheats on you.
 

When your waifu cheats on you.
 

OOoops! Are you telling me that every time I ripped off all the legs of a grasshopper and stuck it in an ant pile or spiders web I was doing a bad thing?
But yeah, I really liked Rin's character through her route and Lancer was truly a great bro. Get ready for the third route though, it's gonna be a doozy.

 
So I'm still stuck on Kyou's route in Hatsukoi and, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, they actually used a condom during her sex scene. I think this is the first time I've seen a condom appear in a Visual Novel? It's mind blowing! Holy shit!
 
Also, this is straight up terrifying

Honestly I think her art is overrated. She needs to make it less shiny and make the characters have less same face. 

We've come a long way:
 

We've come a long way:
 

We've come a long way:
 

We've come a long way:
 

We've come a long way:
 

Japanese has a super rich vocabulary. Even the most confident translators would often look up words in translations, sometimes just for confirmation, but not infrequently simply because they've never encountered the word before or it's being used in a context that they've never seen it used before thus confirming what other possible uses of the word there may be. From what I've read, most tertiary educated native speakers know approximately 50,000 words. Literature, depending on complexity, often uses infrequently used words for colour, and even native speakers will encounter words they've never seen before - often they can surmise the meaning simply from context simply because it is their native language, but not always. Guessing at a word's meaning is not accurate enough for translation. By the time one is fluent in a second language, they usually know about 10,000 words. The likelihood of needing a dictionary is still high at that level, yet they clearly have the knowledge to translate. The most famous Japanese dictionaries have almost 500,000 words in them...

Why Is Denuvo Anti-consumer?
 
If you have a problem with your payment method on a later game purchase, your account will be disabled blocking all your Denuvo games from working. Steam support is notoriously slow to respond so your account may be disabled for weeks or months. Supporting the ability of platforms to disable your entire game library is anti-consumer. Denuvo stops games from supporting Linux or OS X. Not only do the publishers not release ports, but using Denuvo means third parties like the Wine project can't support them either. Games like Inside, the sequel to Limbo, are an example of Denuvo stopping Linux support. Limbo supported Linux and OS X, and Inside is built using Unity engine which can easily make Linux builds. But because they are using Denuvo, it can't be played on any other operating system. Another example is Doom 2016. The beta version worked great on Linux when used with Wine project. But the final release came encumbered with Denuvo, effectively stopping Wine from supporting the game on Linux and OS X. Preventing games from working on other operating systems is anti-consumer. Denuvo games require reactivation if you haven't played them in a while or if you change any of your computer's hardware, and you must authenticate with Denuvo servers every time you receive an update (Simply allowing Steam to update is not enough. You must also open the game once while connected to the internet after each update). They don't require always online, but they do require sometimes online. Some people don't believe this, so here's proof: This is from a user that left it in offline mode for a week or so and didn't play it. This wasn't their first launch. Denuvo makes it difficult or impossible to play games without some form of internet connection. Sure lots of people have internet connections, but not everyone does. Requiring an internet connection for offline single-player games is anti-consumer. If your internet drops without preparing for offline beforehand you can't play your Denuvo crapware. If at some point in the future any part of their DRM service chain is shut down due to internet outage or a company going bankrupt, games will be inaccessible. Some people reply "but surely these companies will provide a method access if they are shutting down servers!" If a company is in bankruptcy and there's an outcry to get patches out for 15 year old games, I doubt they're going to make it a priority to devote resources and development time to creating patches. It wouldn't be the first time a library of DRM-encumbered crapware went poof. Remember the single-player game Darkspore? It is impossible for anyone to play it anymore. Neither pirates nor customers can play it. They didn't release a patch to make it work offline. Here's what it shows up as on Origin: Supporting an ecosystem which could disappear your games is anti-consumer. In many cases after an online game has their servers shut down, modders can get the online portion working again by modifying the executable to work with a new master server list. With Denuvo, when EA says the online fun is over that's the end of it because modders won't be able to fix the game. That's anti-consumer. Having Denuvo on your games means that if a game comes out that's Oculus Rift only and has strong anti-tamper protections, you'll have no way to ever get it working on other VR platforms. Anti-consumer vendor lock-in. Denuvo locks you into your purchase platform for now to eternity. If you purchase a Denuvo game on Steam, you must use Steam forever or abandon your purchases to the wind. If your Steam account gets hacked or locked, your games are gone, because they were never really yours, and you never really even had a copy of them. You can't make playable back-ups of your games. This isn't helping the consumer. A large point of Denuvo is to enable vendors and publishers to lock down the functionality of their games and provide them with a simplified means of doing all the bad anti-consumer things they've always wanted to do. While Denuvo copy protection may not in and of itself do the something bad ("see Denuvo does nothing wrong!") it enables the publishers to do it.  
 
         Source: Why Is Denuvo Bad? by Lexarie