alpacaman

People get drawn to types of media for several reasons, a possible one being that they share their personal views and values. As you pointed out, most eroge are sexist to some degree, some of them completely objectify women, so it's only logical that some fraction (even if it's really small) of its fandom likes the genre because of all the sexism, not despite all the sexism. If people who share these views get into an environment where they feel enabled to express them, you quickly get a situation like the one you described.

It really depends on what kind of story you want to read. Seeing what kind of VNs you rated highly, Grisaia really might be right up your alley, but in my opinion (I'm currently reading it) it takes a good 10-20 hours until you get anything resembling some sense of conflict (which I personally need to keep reading for longer stretches of time). If you can motivate yourself to read something without any any actual plot for some time, but just painting really detailed personalities by means of SoL (at least for the first hours), it's a really good read. Dengeki Stryker is a fun to read action story mocking many action manga tropes while having an interesting enough plot and cast (very cliché though, but that's part of the fun) to be entertaining beyond being just a parody. Steins;Gate's is a great scifi thriller/drama imo, but the first half is paced rather slowly and your enjoyment of that part depends on how much you enjoy the characters and the science. What I love about the pacing in general is that it really knows when to give the reader and the protagonist some time to breath inbetween action, comedy and exposition. This gives the whole experience a really quiet vibe despite it being quite a ride. Just don't expect too much romance since the VN makes it pretty clear who the main heroine is and all the other character endings are clearly supposed to be bad endings since they are all pretty short and end on depressing notes.

My review of Alternative:

rockmandash12 hasn't uploaded anything for two years now but he reviewed a few VNs on his channel, for the most part famous ones.

Immortal Nazi wizards invading a small Japanese city, to be precise. Also something something French Revolution something something Catholic Church. I've started reading The Fruit of Grisaia. So far too little has happened for me to form a valid opinion but at least now I know where some of the VN emoticons come from.

Mattel Germany decided to sell Scrabble as "BuchstabenYOLO" (meaning "letter YOLO") from now on, advertising it with a teribble commercial (it's in German of course but you get the gist of it without understanding a word) starring the rapper MC Fitti whose trademark is using old teen slang and lots of made up anglicisms ironically which for some reason is very popular with prepubescent teens. The caption above the video translates to "Turn up the swag!" by the way. The whole thing feels like one of those satirical fake commercials in comedies but for some reason the decision makers at Mattel Germany thought this was a good idea.

VLR is the sequel to 999, so you should read 999 first anyway. You don't have a real choice anyway as long as you don't own a handheld, since for PC they are exclusively sold as a bundle. In the case of 999 I agree, since at first it's pretty cryptic which route your choices send you down. But once you think about it, the way you reach the good routes is pretty logical because you just have to keep following the characters that gave you important information at the previous door. In VLR I found the AB system to be one of the best parts since you could never know what implications your choices had, but the immediate impact was still obvious (certain characters liking you more/less). All branches except for the bad endings gave you new information necessary to understanding the greater mysterey or at least someones motivations. My main problem with the branching system was that there was a lot of repitition between them since a lot of events happened no matter what choices you made before but tiny line changes force you to read a lot of the content several times. I agree that this part of the discussion should be moved to a different thread.

999 and especially Virtue's Last Reward are structured like this if I understand you correctly. 999 gives you different information based on choices you make early on and you need information from the two major routes to reach the true ending. VLR branches off with every decision, each one kind of focussing on another character (not a heroine) and giving you information you need to reach the true ending where all routes converge.

About six years ago I discovered 999 on IGN's list of the best DS games. I really loved it, so I went looking for more. First I watched the sequel as a LP (because I didn't own a 3DS), then I discovered Ace Attorney which I also really liked so I played all four parts available at the time. But with me not knowing both franchises were actually VNs I didn't find similar titles since VNs are usually not covered in mainstream gaming journalism. Then I forgot about the genre for some time (with a short Hatoful Boyfriend intermezzo, which I had just picked up for shits and giggles, but ended up really enjoying it). I only discovered it again when Zero Time Dilemma came out. I revisited the prequels and started looking for similar games, this time for serious. Next up was Danganronpa, then Steins;Gate and so on.

Every dish that is basically just meat cooking in its own juice is tasty as long as you don't add too much of the wrong ingredient because it contains plenty of everything that makes food taste satisfying: salt, fat and sodium glutamate (the bouillon only amplifies this in your recipe). And adding more complex notes like red wine or something smoky or spicy can turn a dish that's just satisfying into something really tasty.

It's basically a simplified version of beef bourguignon so it should probably taste just fine. Adding some tomato purée might taste good and would probably make the liquid a bit thicker as well.

Nearly everything you wrote is incorrect. Nazi imagery is completely legal in Germany when shown for educational or artistic purposes. Neither is it illegal to talk about the Third Reich. In my school time we spent about two semesters of history classes on the Nazis, talked about them in German classes, ethics/philosophy/religious education classes, and so on. Every other day you have documentaries about this time period, many of them focussing on war crimes and the Holocaust. And yes, they are full of swastikas and SS-Runes. Glorifying the Third Reich and denial of the holocaust are illegal, but so they are in many other countries. Crime rates in Germany haven't gone up more since 2015 than you would expect considering the demography of the asylum seekers. Many of them are young men, and young men coomit more crimes than other demographics, no matter if they are white or not. The terrorist attacks you're talking about don't really change how safe it is to live in Germany. 12 murders more each year aren't that much in a country with 82 million inhabitants. The same goes for the whole Cologne thing. The overwhelming majority of rapes are still committed by family members. Talking about problems regarding immigration isn't illegal in Germany either. If you know just one example of someone who went to jail in Germany for talking about immigration I would like to hear it. You only get fined when you use racist slurs with the intention to insult someone or call for violence against ethnic groups. If you know of any other cases, again, I'd like to hear about them.

Oh, I should have clarified that my paragraph about criticism of the EU was refering to the people who did criticise the EU in general, not you. With the rest of your comment I agree for the most part, only that this copyright reform was initiated by western and northern european countries. This isn't a case of authoritarian governments trying to suppress free speech but one of members of the EU-parliament being manipulated by certain corporate interests and the damage to free speech rights is more of a byproduct.

Only that this law has been lobbied for especially by German media publishers and the link tax (in a slightly less radical form) has been law in Germany for five years and is known by the beautiful name "Leistungsschutzrecht". As far as I know no news aggregators had to shut down because of it. Which doesn't make it less stupid. The argument supporters of this law made back then was that it would be necessary to prevent Google from making billions with content they don't own without the actual content owners seeing any of that money. Even if you accept this point and ignore that media companies profit from exposure when people click a link to an article, the law was completely ineffective because guess what Google did? They told publishers they wouldn't link any content they had to pay for. But the publishers knew they needed Google's reach to get any traffic and make ad revenue online so they gave licenses to Google for free. The bigger problem is Article 13 for the reasons mentioned by the op. I wouldn't turn the criticism of this law into a general criticism of the EU. This concrete issue is more about members of parliaments being mostly old people who don't know how modern technology works and believe lobbyists' arguments that you can just apply laws from the physical world to the digital one without thinking about the implications or practicality.

Sure, I didn't mean to say there are no differences or all moeges are automatically nakige, only that it's not really worth debating over which category a game belongs to.

Karaage. But seriously, aren't the terms pretty fluid? Most nakiges contain cute girls doing cute things (like in moege), charage usually has sad and cathartic moments, and so on.

How about Kara no Shoujo (+sequel)? It's made by the same studio and takes place in the same universe.

Because it's a story that makes you want to grief for a little bit, and summer resort really isn't the place for that? Would at least be my guess. I would say the best way to enjoy it is reading it on a rainy autumn day with some time to spare for an evening walk to collect your feelings and thoughts after you're finished. I finished Root Double and, well, my feelings on it are very mixed. The overall plot is incredibly complex and the writers manage to pull it off without leaving even the tiniest plot hole open. The way some new information makes you see previous events in a completely new light is impressive. The endings are satisfying (even the numerous bad ones). When it picks up the pace it's very engaging. But there are just too many things that annoyed me to really love it. My main critique is that the storytelling lacks focus. Instead of focusing on the bigger picture it tries to explain every tiny detail. When a bigger twist happens you have to watch most of the scenes again that were impacted by it. When you learn that character X was actually working for organization Y the story doesn't just give you the information and a reason for why the character did it but you have to watch flashbacks about what their relationship to someone important to them was like, how that brought them into the mindset to work for Y, how they made contact to organization Y, and so on. Usually I'm a big fan of "show don't tell" but in Root Double the over-expositon sometimes really breaks the flow of the story imo. Especially since it's often implemented quite mechanically. A major part of chapter 4 is structured like this: Find person X -> short action scene -> flashback -> repeat for next person. At the point you go into the flashback you usually already know too much about the character to really be surprised by what happens. Additionally the story often shows you scenes several times, only from different perspectives that often don't add that much that it couldn't have been handled with less repetition. All that being said, it's still pretty good (I rated it at 8/10 on vndb). I'm just frustrated because Root Double wasted too much of its potential to be really amazing.

The difference between academic, online forum and fictional writing is quite big though, especially if you're trying to switch between languages. I remember our teachers hating it when we used literary devices we learned in English classes for creative writing in German. Some things that sound good in one language can turn out really cringeworthy when you translate them literally into another one. Maybe you should try reading some literature you like that's written in your native language first to get back into the right mindset? I don't think you can really forget how to write in your native language.

What country is the screenshot from? When I clicked the link everything cost nearly twice as much (I just payed 9,03€ for Aselia th Eternal). The prices are still fair imo but I'm surprised the differences in pricing seem to be that different depending on ordering location.

Key's formula really is like a drug, withdrawal symptoms included. Some people even start seeing ghosts

I second Zero Escape (especially the first one, 999). It's very similar when it comes to setup and sci-fi/mystery themes but imo better in nearly every regard. Danganronpa uses the "people confined in a mysterious facility"-setup as well, but throws some Ace Attorney and lots of dark humour into the mix. G-senjou no Maou also has pretty fast pacing.

The last route was an appropriate finale for the VN. I thought it could have done something more interesting with its setup but went for the "even bigger final boss". Still It wrapped everything up nicely and its message never seemed too forced. Since then I have picked up Root Double and finished the first 1 1/4 routes. The comparisons to the Zero Escape series are pretty obvious with the story starting out in a deserted but inescapable facility and the story using similar supernatural/sci-fi concepts. But it does enough things differently to not just seem like a clone, e.g. the plot has no real branches except for bad endings but it's still told in a non-linear fashion which so far is done well. The only thing that's really annoying me so far is the choice system. Instead of just presenting you with multiple choices there is a mechanic where you pick a value from 0-8 for every character affected by your next action with a higher number meaning you having "higher senses" for them. While sounding interesting in theory it's never quite clear beforehand if having higher senses for someone means trusting them more, caring more for them, having confidence in them or whatever and depending on the situation this can lead to the protagonist doing the opposite of what you wanted him to do. And there are nearly no decisions where you need other values than 1, 4 or 8 to progress, so having such a nuanced system seems like a waste.

The only choice readers should get to make in VNs is whose bento you want to eat. In all seriousness: Certain villains not showing up at all or completely switching their plans without you having made any choice that could have led there obviously is a plot hole, but one that imo is usually acceptable if there is something like a true route. In these cases you can consider the other routes as a different story that could have happened. Most VNs don't aim for a cause-and-effect narrative, so it's kind of harsh to judge them based on that imo. That being said, choices that don't chang anything relevant or ones where it's impossible to judge what direction the story takes you (except when that's the point the story wants to make) are pretty annoying.

I sometimes reread a vn shortly before a sequel comes out to get myself into the right mood/mindset and to be able to get all references.