adamstan

^what they said
(Oh yeah, I just saved myself from typing two @'s- oh, bollocks)

All best wishes to @adamstan and @Nayleen!

Happy belated 31st birthday to our admin @Nayleen and happy 35th birthday to @adamstan there. I hope both of you will have a good year ahead.

https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2019/08/10/the-language-of-love/
Feel free to discuss the review/the game, if anyone is actually interested in that, but I created this mostly to celebrate the fact that we have first content on the main site since exactly one year ago (not counting VNTS). And while publishing a single article on August 10th every year would be an interesting gimmick, I kind of hope to see more life there (and not just my EVN reviews too, that would be in really bad taste). If you find in yourself some energy for writing about a recent release, I'm sure no one will scoff at even one-time contributions, if they keep a decent-enough quality. We don't have a review team leader ATM, but if you contact me or @Emi, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to figure it out.
And the blog staff recruitment post is also still up. :3

Yup, this will be the same broken crap we know from the Steam version. If Pulltop actually cared, they would release the Cruise Sign PS3 port (a high-effort all-ages version that didn't exist when the first IMHHW localisation was made) in English with fixed translation, but that would require actual effort and investment. Why bother when you can make a cheap cash-grab.

No, yeah, the Kanon H scenes are truly awful. They were actually my first experience with H in a VN, and I was like, god, why is this a thing. And then I think my next experience was F/SN, which only reinforced that view. I had to play one more game with H in it (it ended up being Comyu) before I finally started thinking maybe H scenes weren't so bad after all.

Ancient Sakura no Kisetsu had some nice kiss CGs - with the lips together
Aki:
Kiyomi:
Mio:
 

Well, they were just unusually bad and unfitting. While reading most of the moeges, I wasn't immediately wishing for all-ages version. But when first scene in Kanon came up, I was all like "Fuck it, I'm out. Switching to all-ages version right now." Same with AIR.

I don't see anything special/unusual about this description. ;p

KEY VNs are really special in this regard - they are much better in all-ages version, since H-scenes were so horrible and out of place that they were actually detracting from experience. They weren't making "full experience", they were tacked-on.
Such statements sound a bit like obsession or paranoia to me. "I don't care if it makes VN better or not, gimme my porn, you bastards!"
IMO It should be treated on case-by-case basis, not with such broad approach.
Because making it that way was mistake in this case - which KEY seems to implicitly admit, by releasing "Memorial Editions", "Perfect Editions" etc as all-ages versions. And, anyways, knowing what to cut out is essential skill in any creative work
I know it might be hard to believe, but really, sometimes less is more. Why do you deny authors the right to improve their work?
But well, whatever, to each their own porn
BTW Little Busters was all-ages title originally. They added h-scenes later, in "Ecstasy" version (together with three side routes). And then they apparently decided, that it wasn't good move, so they removed them again for Memorial Box and Perfect Edition.
Disclaimer: All that rant above is just about KEY (and maybe To Heart, since Leaf also said in some interview that h-scenes in this were tacked-on mistake and PSE edition is definitive one)
In case of other VNs I tend to agree that it's best to have both versions available.

FWIW, JAST said on r/visualnovels that there will be adult patch for Steam version too.
 

To be honest, this is one of the VNs that I would heavily prefer without h-scenes. Like it often happens, the fact that sex happens is pretty important, but the scenes themselves are very distracting and completely mess up the overall pacing. Actually, this may be the main reason why, while I understood that this VN was very good objectively, I personally didn't really like it that much.

The answer is no, and I'm not seeing how that has to do with anything or what makes it a better question.

VNs actually offer a lot in terms of what the creators can do that isn't really possible in other media. They can use the similar literary devices as in plays while having the possibility for a first person narrator, passages in prose and a branching narrative, while keeping full control over the visuals, soundtrack and acting choices and without having the same time restrictions which offers more options when it comes to story structure and pacing.

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.

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

Of course it does not. It's not even the same genre...
This is just like one of those interactive touching game on mobile, not really something special, at all...

I loved Sakura Sakura (probably more than Fureraba, and certainly more than SukiSuki) - it somehow clicked for me, but haven't read Newton yet - the premise doesn't attract me immediately, and it indeed is quite expensive, and never gets any decent price cut during Steam sales, so I haven't bought it so far.

Playing Akatsuki no Goei. Can't complain as it's been fun so far.

I'm pretty sure people downvoted it because of its episodic nature rather than anything else. The game itself looked pretty decent, but it was way too short to give it even approximate rating. Like, do you rate a manga after reading just one chapter or an anime after watching first 10 minutes of its first episode? I sure don't.

Thought you meant this one for a moment there LOL

I started Hitotsu Yane no, Tsubasa no Shita de - Under one wing.
First impressions - I like the characters, but their design... ugh... the artist went totally overboard with those boobs. Kyonyuu high-school girls definitely aren't my thing. Well, Hikari seems to look normal. Kazusa - it depends on the pose, in CGs she's normal, but sprites also are somewhat off. But Nohoko and Saiko - come on, gimme a break! Those balloons sticked to their chests aren't sexy, they're ridiculous, as they seem just tacked on - proportions seem to be completely off. If they toned it down from current E+++ to something like D it would have been much better.
And then, at the opposite end is flat Mimarin
Let's see how it turns out.

I've just finished Da Capo - well I say finished but I only read 3 routes - Nemu, Sakura, and Kotori) and Kotori Love ExP and honestly, I was left *quite* disappointed by the both of them. It's been said that Da Capo hasn't aged so well, and the translation/editing has some issues, and I did find those two concerns were ones I shared as well. It was a bit surprising, too, because I'm usually okay with plodding through books/VNs like that, but here it did feel like there were quite a few issues, to the point where they detracted from my enjoyment of the VN. The thing I was most disappointed by was frankly
 It felt like it was forced, didn't really have all that much of an explanation as to how and why it was happening, and felt like they were being more and more ridiculous for the sake of it, and that really damaged my immersion in the story, as well as my desire and ability to care about the characters. It didn't help things much that Junichi seemed to complain regularly and be rather curmudgeonly. 
Kotori Love ExP felt like more of the same, so it was easier to get into since I did actually enjoy Kotori's route the most and by that point I knew what to expect, so getting to see more in that route was nice, but the stories themselves weren't particularly amazing or gripping, and felt like run of the mill stories. It felt like a fandisc, which I suppose it is, but it didn't really feel like it added anything to the experience. Contrast that to (for example) Princess Evangile W Happiness which did have some nice stories for the heroines and also added "routes" for the supporting cast (Marika's, Mitsuki's, and Ruriko's being especially good). 
It's not all bad though - the setting was one I enjoyed, the soundtrack was really good (though short), and (especially in Kotori Love ExP) the artwork was also quite nice, with the CGs being a particular highlight. I also really enjoyed the earlier slice of life portions and the use of the alarm clock to influence what happens next. I think overall it was worth spending the time reading through them. It's just... I'm probably being quite critical, but I was hoping it'd be something like Koichoco, which I liked despite its divisive parts, and I was hoping I'd be able to "get" why it's been such a popular series (at least by the looks of it. That... Didn't wind up happening, and instead it felt like a overly generic VN that tried too hard. It's also made me somewhat reluctant to read Da Capo II. I'm not sure what I'm going to read next, but hopefully it'll be a more engaging read, as it's been a while since I've had a VN that leaves me actively wanting to read it.

To be fair - sometimes h-scenes are less "porny", and more "lovely", (haven't you recently said that h-content in The Language of Love was decent?), but sadly it doesn't happen as often as I'd like But in general I agree with your posts in this thread.
As for comparing all ages and adult versions - besides the obvious example of KEY, the writers of the first ToHeart also said that the h-scenes in first PC version were tacked-on ("we're making an eroge, so we need sex scenes" line of reasoning), and they consider later all-ages PSE edition to be definitive version of the game.

Those two lines are somehow contradictive. Because if the JP console version sold well, then that means that it has its place, and you cannot say "Noratoto wouldn't sell without H-scenes". The platform doesn't matter.

Are there really many people that buy both versions? I find it a bit hard to believe