nekofuwafuwa

So, I've been checking some visual novels the last month, and I've notice people don't seem to be buying them much. Like, for example, games like Hello Goodbye,Trinoline and Nurse Love Syndrome barely have reviews. I'm wondering if people are stopping playing visual novels since many don't seem to be buying them. I was really surprised by Nurse Love Syndrome since it barely has reviews and another Yuri title that came out. Also, when I was reading a review for Trinoline, a person talked about Minori went out of business due to not being able to create what they wanted to. Basically, only creating adult games with little to not story and not meaningful ones. Basically saying fans of visual novels care more about adult content then actual story. 
 
So I guess I have two questions, are visual novels sales going down, and sales for story driven visual novels going down as well? They don't seem to be doing to well, not even Sekai Project. 

What I remember about Shuffle is that it was scene-based--it jumps straight to the notable moments, much like an anime.  This is likely one of the reasons it is popular in the West.  Many games try to fill out each day from the protagonist's perspective, from when he gets up to when he goes to bed.  It's very difficult to tell a compelling narrative like this unless your protagonist or setting are extremely unique and you can make each moment meaningful and fascinating.  Most attempts fail.

That's very interesting! In contrast to this SPIRAL! thing they released some time ago, this actually 'looks' like Shuffle. Those are clearly Sia and Nerine on the cover page. I guess it certainly helps that the original artists are actually drawing the VN this time and aren't just 'assisting with school uniform design' and leaving the character designs to a loli artist from Da Capo. 
Maybe... there is even a chance for my favorite character Ai (my avatar) from the Nerine fan disc to be included. 
The list of writers actually looks pretty impressive. They have Ou Jackson and Higashinosuke on board, the main writers of Oretachi and Tsuriotsu which are Navel's most highly regarded works. I hope they'll keep the the two Da Capo writers from messing things up.
That was certainly one of the main reasons it got popular both in Japan and in the west. It's rating isn't high, but there aren't that many VN's with more than 3000 votes on VNDB. Popularity isn't just about a high rating but also about the vote count. Shuffle's main strength was arguably its simplicity, so it's not surprising that the rating isn't high. It's the same with Nekopara - huge popularity and high vote count, but the rating is below 7.
I also appreciate that Shuffle was a somewhat fast-paced moege - in the worst case it at least didn't overstay its welcome. Many moeges nowadays are real slice of life monsters with huge amounts of filler text that unfortunately have the tendency to bore me to death. 
Though Shuffle did have an interesting setting, so I think there's also more potential in it than just a simple moege if they want to.

Project is on the backburner, but there are some good news - I found a way to extract scripts from voiced JP version - AE was able to extract files, and then isfcodec to decode. After that, ArcTool can extract strings using the same method as with translated version.
So now it should be possible to restore that missing line from Matsuri's route, and also, when I finally get to it, I should be able to compare TL with original text, which may come useful when fixing those few lines that are hard to understand in TL.

Well, it looks like I'm slowly figuring it out, and even getting some results back

It looks like I wiil have to extract each part of text separately, edit and recompile. Fortunately, as the above image proves, Arctool is able to put edited lines back into game. It works like a "translation" - you don't replace lines, but add edited lines after "=" sign in extracted strings file.

Oppai Ending in Rewrite confirmed as true route!

Other people might disagree with me, but I'd like to bring up Kana Little Sister, or the updated version, Kana Okaeri. It's generally considered a good VN, but I rarely see anyone mention it, possibly because of the fact that the original version will celebrate its 20th anniversary in two months. Despite its age, I think it deserves more time in the spotlight, since it's one of the visual novels that has had the most impact on me emotionally.

I agree. While i liked the vn as a whole, i do think the heavy story it tried to tell us fell flat on it's belly with that ending.

Only thing wrong is calling ripe and beautiful women "old hags" :<

Whatever, none of what you say matters and won't deter me from reading and enjoying this. Having such kamige translated by Conjueror, just imagine something being absolutely perfect and adding another layer of perfection on top!
Though in all honesty, whenever I see a thread about some new game I don't care about, I tend to not bother posting. Don't you think it's wrong to talk the game down when you haven't played it or know anything besides the synopsis, if all you have is your educated guess? In fact, I don't think I've ever really played any game with this May-December Romance type of plot, so I'm quite looking forward to it.

Hello! Have a nice stay! 

There's a lot of crappy translations (at least in the past) and content cutting going about, certainly. But charging 20 dollars (or 16,50 euros) for a VN fandisc is not money hungry or price gouging. Partitioning and making DLC only helps the consumer so long as the overall price of the product is not above the norm for the type of content, and here it is most definitely not.
It'd be the same bloody thing if they made no DLC and instead sold everything for the 20 dollars it amounts to, except it'd have taken longer, people only interested in routes other than Akari would need to pay for the route they don't want, and people interested only in Akari wouldn't feel strangely 'cheated'.
(The 20 dollars = main game + DLC)

Great to see the When They Cry series grow. I think it is the best move for MG. What I also hope is they translate Trianthology

Yesterday I finished To Heart PSE
It was nice, but uneven. I've written my impressions from first seven routes in earlier posts.
So at first let's look at remaining three routes.

Kotone's route was nice. Not anything spectacular, or especially romantic - for most of the time it was another of "friendship" routes - but it had some good scenes near the ending, and all in all was good and felt pretty satisfying.

Rio's route was much better than I expected from reading reviews. First impression wasn't great, but she grew up on me (much like she did on MC). Also, it was interesting because here whole setup was reversed - she suddenly confesses to MC right at the beginning, while he's all "Eh? But I don't know a single thing about you! Let's start as friends and get to know each other" - and so they start to slowly build their relationship. Nice

And the last one - Serika's younger sister, Ayaka. Her mini-route is exclusive to PSE version. I'd say she's definitely one of the best girls in the game, but her route didn't live up to her character. It was nice, but something was lacking - the ending felt too rushed. Still, not bad, and I absolutely loved 膝枕(lap-pillow) scenes
So, to sum it up, if I had to rank routes, it would end up something like this (I will rate them in groups):
First place - Multi, Tomoko and Lemmy
Second place - Serika, Akari and Shiho
Third place - Kotone, Rio and Ayaka
Fourth place - Aoi - the only route that felt utterly disappointing for me. I liked Aoi as a character when I met her in Akari's route, but her own route bored me to death.
Art and music were nice, as well as voice acting.
All in all - nice old high-school moege. Took me pretty long time to finish (I read it in Japanese, so it was much slower), but I don't regret it.
7.5/10
Now I'm reading Yukizakura fan-disc - Saki no LoveLove Honeymoon - and after that I think I'll try Hitotsuba.

Oh my god. I guess that I'm never visiting Poland. 
Happy Jesus and Chocolate day to everyone! 

Well, I really liked the Ciconia simultaneous release announcement. 

Hi fellas, Chronopolis here. I want to rollout to you guys this new videos series I'm testing: The VN Guided Tour Project.   The idea is that I'll do a read-through of VN prologues, reading aloud the unvoiced text, and explaining the vocab and grammar.   Reading VN's is very difficult when you first start out. One of the challenges, is that there are a lot of expressions and grammar patterns (out-of-my-ass number, like 33%-40%) which aren't covered by JLPT, but which show up commonly in novels. You can find a lot of grammar guides on the web, so I want to offer something which is dead focused on reading Visual Novels.
This series is for people who have down some reading in Japanese, but who still maybe struggle on tackling different titles. If you've haven't or have just started reading VN's in Japanese, it might be difficult to follow, but you could try anyways. I explain almost all of it. So far, I've recorded two videos.       Thoughts on this format, anyone? I'd especially like to hear your feedback if you are someone who might use this series.   Edit: Started adding some grammar notes for the lessons. Edit 2: Link to the full folder. I'm going to add some longer guides for JP grammars that need full explanations. Not going to cover everything, just a few select topics. So far there is just one super-guide on conditionals.  
 

Well, I really liked the Ciconia simultaneous release announcement. 

I really wish people would stop paying for SakuraGame's localizations. Then again, I doubt they'd stop making them either way, considering how little work they have to put in.

Everything besides the UI looking good.
And sometimes not being able to sort by columns when doing searches.

Erogamescape is essentially the Japanese alternative to VNDB.  Its advantage is that the ratings / popularity aren't biased by translation status.

We can't really change/add to surveys that are running but since we're looking for feedback we went ahead and added it to Denpasoft. Feel free to suggest improvements related to Sekai in Denpasoft's survey as we're organizing all the responses and will be giving feedback on them when we're done crunching the data.

It make us to be more patient for waiting their release, and it also teach us to be grateful on what we received. I also like that they even give one of their license to the newer company, and I didn't see them complaining. Also let's not forget their patient boss who always answer the customer complain with nice words. And that's what make Sekai great.

Yeah, a good protagonist should be a super manly badass who doesn't give a fuck about anything. And he should curse, smoke, drink beer and after drinking the beer, throw the bottle at some bitch's head. 

It happens a lot with me. >.<
I am ashamed for this but sometimes I just don't feel like continuing some novel...
So I stop playing for a while and if it becomes a long period, then I re-start playing it from the begin.