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Frullo NDE

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  1. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Plk_Lesiak in Why Visual Novels?   
    Good question to ask on Lemma where actual developers hang out.
    But IMO, the ability to tell multi-route, interactive stories is the obvious one. With VNs in which multi-route structure matters, it's not even a question why they are not in any other medium. They simply couldn't be. You could possibly ask why are they not other kinds of video games, but especially with SoL titles, that kind of framing makes little sense? There are of course ways to convey stories through gameplay, but if your number one goal is to present a complex, branching narrative, this kind of interactive fiction is just a logical and cost-effective choice.
    With kinetic novels it's more of a legitimate question. but still, VNs offer a pretty unique multimedia experience. Would Eden* manga, Eden* LN or Eden* novel be as rich of an experience as the original is? Probably not, because they wouldn't offer that complete mix of high-quality visuals, music, VA and literary text. They could modify the original to create an excellent experience in their own formula, but they'd have to sacrifice some aspects of it in the process. Not to claim VNs are by default a superior medium, because that's always a dumb thing to say with how much taste and execution matters in this, but they definitely have their merits.
    And in the end, there's VN being PC games that can include porn. I'm always a bit sceptical about claims of what porn can do for a story, but I have no doubts about how much story can do for porn. In the West, pornography with genuine, compelling context to it doesn't exist. It all operates in the Pornhub philosophy of fap-length videos with 30-second buildups. If you want to tell a genuine story combined with hentai you make a VN and for the players, it offers an experience that they pretty much can't find anywhere else.
  2. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Plk_Lesiak in Why Visual Novels?   
    I can speak only for myself and my motivation to read VNs is a bit sketchy in the first place. At first, I simply kept them as an allowed exception while trying to limit my video game habits. It evolved to the current state of affairs, where I more or less stopped playing any other kind of games. The reason I find visual novel way less toxic for me is because they require some basic intellectual effort to follow the story and don't include endless gameplay loops I could burn countless hours on. They're stories to experience, and not autistic sandboxes that'll suck me in for a week and spit out with with bloodshot eyes and realisation of dozens of hours burned on something that didn't even left me an impression that would be worth sharing with anyone.
    But, if course, if there wasn't something in VN that I really enjoyed, I wouldn't get so much into them. For me its:
    1. Incredible variety of conclusive romance stories. I honestly didn't know I liked romance stories this much before I came back to watching anime regularly and started reading VNs. But anime quite too often means harem comedies and I happen to hate "romance" in those. Because they never commit and when they do, it's usually not the girl I was rooting for. This is why having a route for every heroine is an enormous perk. I identified the best girl? I can get the MC to romance her. I like some secondary ones? Also covered. The rest of them? I probably got enough connection to the whole cast by this point to enjoy them too in the end. No linear media will give me that.
    2. Variety of romance stories once more. Yuri, otome, galge, BL. Fluffy love stories and serious drama. Tiny games for half an evening and novel-sized epics. VNs got you all covered. It might get stale if you just read moege, but, partially because of my weird blogging endeavours, I end up reading incredibly varied stuff and so far I didn't get bored of any of it.
    3. Anime art. I love anime art over any other style. Give me anime girls kissing and you can take all the rest of my visual media away, I won't complain much. But aside from my personal deviancy, VN art is just that good in many cases.
    4. And well, for someone like me, with pretty limited visual imagination, in many cases VNs are simply more compelling than literature. I like having at least some visual representation of what I'm reading to give my mind some point of reference/guide on how to interpret it all. For example, I'm not sure if I'd have enjoyed reading Dune as much as I did if I didn't have some vision of its world from the classic games I played. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, but from my experience, that's just how my brain is wired and I can't do much about it. VNs are a pretty good compromise between literary text and graphics, showing you a lot but still leaving a lot of gaps for your imagination to fill.
    Curious what other people's motivations are. :3
  3. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to lunaterra in Visual Novel Steam Sales Declining?   
    If there's been a drop in Steam sales for VNs, I think it's most likely a side effect of Valve's algorithm changes benefiting already-popular/AAA games and being detrimental to indie and niche games rather than anything to do with the VN scene itself. While the article focuses on Western indie games, I think it's applicable to "non-indie" VNs too--they're still very niche products that don't sell enough for a sales-based recommendation system to benefit them.
  4. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to novurdim in Mangagamer New Announcements (Anime Boston and Sakuracon 2019) [UPDATED: Along with Anime Central 2019]   
    My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
  5. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to littleshogun in VN from the perspective of gender rebellion   
    That's quite a long winded way to say that you want to play otome VN there, so I hope you'll have fun on playing that latter.
  6. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Dreamysyu in What other content would you want to see from the visual novel community as a whole? (Not just more translations)   
    @Plk_Lesiak is doing a great job giving more recognition to EVNs, but the problem is that he is just a single person, and, like any reviewer, he has his own taste, and it may quite different to the tastes of many JVN readers. And since he only reviews EVNs, if you didn't play many of them yourself, it might be hard to gauge if his taste is even similar to yours or not. Thus, I actually understand why some long-time JVN-only reader may find his reviews unconvincing.
    I'd say, this means that we simply need more EVN reviewers. Or, even better, reviewers who wouldn't make distinctions between JVNs and EVNs and play both.
  7. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to alpacaman in What other content would you want to see from the visual novel community as a whole? (Not just more translations)   
    If you search the blog section, there are a a few interesting older ones (especially those by Palas imo), but recently there has been very little content in that regard. I'm thinking about starting one myself, but I'm not really an expert on these things and tend to struggle with keeping up my motivation up for long term projects. Right now I'm trying to rearrange my loose thoughts on weak protagonists into a cohesive text.
  8. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to alpacaman in What other content would you want to see from the visual novel community as a whole? (Not just more translations)   
    I'd love to see some more in-depth critique and analysis of VNs in general, be it about themes in certain titles, storytelling techniques, common tropes and genres, and so on. 
  9. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from fujoneko in Why do you play Visual Novels?   
    I love deep and complex stories and VNs are a great storytelling medium.
    Also I read and evaluate/edit books as part of my job so I am too fatigued to read them in my free time, and I don't care much about "regular videogames" anymore, so VNs stand nicely inbeetween.
  10. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to BunnyAdvocate in Analysis of Steam VN reviews   
    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.
  11. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from Dreamysyu in Who doesn't play nukige or eroge?   
    I don't care much for h-scenes so I would't play a nukige, but it's ok if it is linked to the plot (the main reason I'm interested in VNs) and not just fanservice, otherwise I prefer all-ages versions if available.
  12. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from adamstan in Who doesn't play nukige or eroge?   
    I don't care much for h-scenes so I would't play a nukige, but it's ok if it is linked to the plot (the main reason I'm interested in VNs) and not just fanservice, otherwise I prefer all-ages versions if available.
  13. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to HataVNI in How can we make visual novels more popular in the west?   
    Making Visual Novels popular is a goal that goes way further beyond the thing you guys are trying to consciously achieve. Most people consider what we think Visual Novels are as Animegames and Porngames, but the genre has so much potential being way more than that if we think about what the genre is. Nowadays people don't read that many books anymore, because everything has to be quick-quick entertainment. In that regard visual novels could provide a new way to tell stories, but it just did not reach this hemisphere yet and this is obvious because the people make VNs without having a real team try to abuse the visual novel genre as a way to get access to the gaming industry. That is also a reason why people try to convert their half-assed fanfictions into visual novels and then make actually sellable games out of them. But what if we make it possible that capable book authors find the genre and think it is revolutionizing? They could produce amazing stories and have the funds to actually found big western based publishers/development studios because they can hire capable people. If we are actually attempting to make VNs popular over here we have to get away from the selfish goal to bring only japanese gems over here. We have to create our own amazing stories, with western-based writing and settings. The art can still attempt to be moe and japanese, but the settings should not try to simulate a japanese one. I'm sick of western studios attempting to create foreign settings they don't understand, because they only gloss over the source material and attempt to rehash what they know from anime, storytelling takes A LOT of research and I'm surprised how japanese manage to use western philosophy in their works better than western developers do..

    What I am trying to say. Try to promote the genre in itself and improve on creating new things instead of rehashing japanese ones and localizing games. We have so many capable people over here in the west, but we don't use their potential which is unfortunate. I'm not telling that we should completely cease localizing japanese titles but we should be less selfish.
     
  14. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Okarin in What kind of VN do you enjoy the best?   
    Rad plotge like Ever 17, Virtue's Last Reward, Steins;Gate and Root Double. Equivalent to seinen in manga terms.
  15. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from ittaku in First visual novel you played + when did you read it + how you went about reading it   
    Seasons of the Sakura, Runaway City and other '90s "hentai games" (that's what they were called back then at least in italian forums) in the earlies 2000s.
    Tried random Vns here and then (inclluding obviously Katawa Shoujo) in the following years, but didn't really get into the scene until I've read Steins;Gate in 2016.
  16. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from PiggiesGoMoo in Subarashiki Hibi discussion   
    I  glad I'm not the only one who was weirded out (not in a good way) by that scene in Insects. At least in Invention all the "dissonance" kinda makes sense in the end, where that one scene seemed just random and ruined the emotional mood for me. And yeah, there are indeed too many useless h-scenes but I guess that's just necessary pandering.

    Overall, I found Subahibi a thrilling but flawed experience. Glad I played it, but the whole "best story in every media ever" that keeps popping around seems kinda laughable to me.
  17. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Dreamysyu in Subarashiki Hibi discussion   
    Yeah, I agree. I think, SubaHibi is a good example of why the formula of "plot with porn", commonly used in VNs, often doesn't work as well as it should. A lot of h-scenes feel completely pointless. Also, they noticeably harm the pacing of the story in the Invention and Insects chapters. I get that, technically, it's porn and should only be judged as such, but still, it's a part of the story, and, at least, it shouldn't feel out of place.
    Other than that, yeah, Subahibi is pretty great. So far it's basically the only "philosophical" VN I've read where philosophy was really interesting and didn't feel out of place. I know that there are a lot of plot points and references that I didn't really understand, but still, it was very entertaining to read.
  18. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Clephas in Thoughts on vn's with gameplay?   
    I hate Myst and Riven, and that is what you just described... at my very limit, I can accept Eternal Darkness (because Eternal Darkness was just so good it transcended its shitty puzzle-solving roots), but gameplay and storytelling being completely indistinguishable is rarely a good thing, in my experience.  While using gameplay to tell part of the story in a VN is actually a good idea (though rarely applied skillfully)... and that is what role-playing games do, by definition (which is probably why rpg-variants are the most common hybridization gameplay type).  When gameplay stops being an aid to telling the story and becomes the point of playing, the hybrid starts to suck. 
    Needless to say, I hate dating-sims.
  19. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from Zalor in The State of VNs   
    I believe the quoted post from 4chan is both intruguing and silly.
    As an indie book publisher that has been recently been researching the VN "industry", I think it's true that a self-publishing writer could possibly find a better chance to success by working on a VN, but only if he has PLENTY of time, money and/or programming/artistic/marketing skills. It's easy to point at DDLC and say "Hey, I could have done that easily", but in most case it would be a blatant lie since, as already stated, DDLC is both clever and well crafted. Probably the same applies to Sakura games (haven't tried them).
    I strongly believe that Visual Novels have a lot of potential which hasn't been exploited yet, but if someone just wants to make some quick cash I would strongly recommend to just publish erotica ebooks (that aren't actually that easy to sell if you don't know what you're doing or have no niche to target, but that's another story) and stay the fuck away from VNs as of now.
  20. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to Norleas in The State of VNs   
    Looking at the Amazon best sellers i see how much the literature is a enlightened medium nowadays, giving to us such godlike titles like The 5 Love Languages or Dog Man and Cat Kid: From the Creator of Captain Underpants.
  21. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to onorub in The State of VNs   
    From seeing all the indie VNs from the renai forums that get brushed aside, i don't see pro writers that are strange to the medium get any significant recognition. I think i can count on my fingers the amount of people that care about Christina Love on fuwa, for example.
    I'd also argue that DDLC became famous for its' production values while Sakura Spirit became famous for its' cringe factor.
  22. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to MarcomiX in What, one feature in some VN's like you'd like to see more commonly in VN's as a whole?   
    The technical perfection of VNs such as Tokyo School Life or Go Go Nippon!. The 2.5D animations in those VNs are great.
  23. Like
    Frullo NDE got a reaction from Plk_Lesiak in The Deadline [OELVN] (Comedy, Surreal) - Demo is out!   
    Hey, Fuwanowel has been very important to fuel firstly my passion for VNs and then the skills to actually direct one. Don't expect romance but do except quality writing (well, I hope so). I think it might particularly interest people who enjoy comedy, surreal plots and/or writing.

    “The Deadline,” a Visual Novel developed by the Italian team NDE Visual which satirizes the publishing industry, will let the player experience the joys and sorrows of a young writer, influence the development of the story through multiple narrative choices, and most of all, have plenty of fun!
    The full version will be out in June 2018 if we don't miss... The Deadline. laughs nervously In the meantime, if you’re interested in writing, enjoy surreal plots, or just want to have a laugh and try something new from an indie team of experienced writers, you can download the Free Demo. It includes about one hour of playtime and introduces the player to the quirky and surreal style of “The Deadline” and its characters. It is available from the 4th of January on itch.io -PC and Mac versions, the Play Store - Android, and the App Store - iOs.
    More on plot, Characters, screenshots and whatever
    Since this is our first Visual Novel and we are still working on the commercial release (of which 80% of script and art are ready), we'd really appreciate if fellows devs or curious readers could give us feedback of any kind, especially about what could be improved.
    If you have questions or anything feel free to ask me. Cheers.
  24. Like
    Frullo NDE reacted to hsmsful in Your experience of "the visual novel entry barrier"   
    I never really got into visual novels much. I was really into anime back when I was 15 and I watched some key anime and heard that there were "games" for them. Same happened for danganronpa and school days. School days was such a weird experience that I wanted to search for the game itself (plus youtube-chan said it was animated). So I kept googling it but all that came up was websites having moon runes in them (dunno if School Days was translated back then or if I was bad at searching stuff). Then I searched for English visual novels and boom.... Katawa Shoujo came up. So I played the game and after finishing it, I searched for similar English visual novels and this led me to this website, fuwanovel itself (a friend told me about it). I found Danganronpa and started playing it. Since I started playing visual novels after Katawa Shoujo, characters being voiced was such an amazing finding for me. I really liked the concept of visual novels because I had a really bad imagination (still do!) so voiced characters + seeing the expressions of characters + having some kind of an ost playing in the background + still having the novel atmosphere was really a good combination.
     I then read Steins;Gate and Fate/stay night and didn't manage to finish one whole visual novel since. So I can't really say that I really got into visual novels. As you can see, what I found to be barriers for me to get into visual novels were several things though (those are subjective to me and probably not a lot of people agree with me on them) :
    1-Sexual Content: until F/SN, I didn't really have much sexual content (I used to skip h-scenes in katawa shoujo) in my visual novels but the sexual content in F/SN had to do with the story so it was arguably ok. I still didn't feel a need to go into an h-scene from beginning till end. I used to read books from time to time and sex scenes were just implied and not described form beginning till the end in full detail (and ofc didn't have illustrations for all their stages) so it was really annoying for a bit since they were not enjoyable. Additionally in other visual novels, sexual content felt really unnecessary. I still think of most sexual content in the visual novels to be utterly unnecessary because there are nukige after all. It's like ignoring all hentai and doujins and just overly implementing h-scenes in all anime and manga.
    2-Idea of routes: despite me liking the idea of being able to choose a route, the inconsistencies in some routes really aggravated me especially in quality. I was never the kind of guy who you can tell "The story gets better ahead so  keep reading". This happened with Shizuru's route in rewrite and mitchiru's route in grisaia no kajitsu and they both made me drop their respective visual novels.
    3-RomCom moments being way too long: even in games that were not considered moege, the romcom moments were still way too long (e.g. fate/stay night itself). Trust me, I do love RomCom moments but I don't want to spend over 10-20 hours of my reading experience on it. And obviously it gets even worse in games that seem to be dedicated to RomCom but are still long (in terms of hours) like my gf is the president, princess evangile and almost every common route (especially in key visual novels like kanon and rewrite and it kinda continued in the routes to a huge degree). Such moments eventually feel repititive and boring for me, put me off and I stop reading the visual novel for a while until I ultimately lose all interest in the visual novel.
    4-Setting of visual novels and being repetitive: Now this is not a problem for me towards visual novels only but it has really irritated me even in anime and manga. After consuming japanese products as my hobby for about 5 years, I am starting to get bored of the same highschool setting with the same generic characters having the same character traits that were introduced in the 80s and 90s and then they were thought to be amazing to just repeat for almost 3 decades. All encounters start to feel so cliché to the point that it's just a meme when they happen. Lack of seriousness and being almost always unrelatable started to become annoying. I guess you could say that not introducing relatable problems might be good since it's a means of escapism but I'd love to see relatable problems from time to time. 
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