alpacaman

I finished Umineko episode 3 and Battler describes just how I feel about the plot ("Dammit! More weird things are happening!") and the mystery ("...I...I-I don't have a clue what's going on anymore...!"). In other words, the whole VN is amazing. I know they are completely different but somehow Umineko constantly reminds me of Twin Peaks in the way everything is always kept kind of vague and further obscured by tons of weird stuff happening that probably adds nothing to solving the mystery but is very entertaining nonetheless. I also picked up some Kate Bush vibes but maybe that's just because the OP sounds a lot like her music. 
I still have a few thoughts on what's happening:
 

It covers the same story as the first season (the second season adapts the VN S;G 0) but it goes into more detail when it comes to the science and the characters. The greatest sin the anime committed was cutting out 4°C 
 
If want to continue reading free VNs at first I would recommend Lucid 9. 

That was practically vanilla

Still reading Muv-Luv Alternative........ my current thoughts are as follows.....
 
OH GOD, WHAT DID I JUST SEE!?
I CANNOT UNSEE THAT!!!
JAPAN, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?
WHY GOD DID I BUY THE +18 PATCH!?
 
...... those who have already read the game know exactly what I'm talking about
I'm surprised I was even able to stomach that, good grief.....

After some hardware troubles I finally got around to reading Umineko. I finished ep 1 and read the first few hours of ep 2 and really got hooked on the weird school festival song. It's really promising so far although I have no idea what direction the story is going to take fill eight 15 hour volumes, considering
All the praise Umineko gets for it's soundtrack is well deserved. While none of the tracks really stuck to me so far (except for the one mentioned above) I don't think I've read another VN where the soundtrack sets the mood for the scenes as well as this one.
Is it just me, or does House in Fata Morgana seem heavily influenced by Umineko? I'm no expert on Japanese scary stories so it's possible that this just is the way artists there tell western-style horror tales, but to me the aesthetics in both titles just seem very similar.

After some hardware troubles I finally got around to reading Umineko. I finished ep 1 and read the first few hours of ep 2 and really got hooked on the weird school festival song. It's really promising so far although I have no idea what direction the story is going to take fill eight 15 hour volumes, considering
All the praise Umineko gets for it's soundtrack is well deserved. While none of the tracks really stuck to me so far (except for the one mentioned above) I don't think I've read another VN where the soundtrack sets the mood for the scenes as well as this one.
Is it just me, or does House in Fata Morgana seem heavily influenced by Umineko? I'm no expert on Japanese scary stories so it's possible that this just is the way artists there tell western-style horror tales, but to me the aesthetics in both titles just seem very similar.

I recently dropped Grisaia no Kajitsu after the first route (Makina) because I found it really disappointing. It's not terrible by any means and I can see why many people love it. Some of the comedy is great (I love Tuna-Fish Man), the characters are all interesting and a few of the backstories are really intense (I watched the anime after dropping the VN to at least know what the deal was Sachi and Amane, so I write about the routes I didn't read assuming the VN didn't drastically change after ~30 hours and the anime kept the basic storylines of the routes intact). The good ingredients never came together for me though, mainly because the ratio of SoL, foreshadowing and something actually happening was way to heavy on the former two. I didn't really dislike any of the scenes but every time one of them started with one of Yuuji's inner monologues (which was about 90% of the time) I thought "welp, nothing's gonna happen in this scene". I would probably have been fine with all the SoL if the VN wasn't constantly reminding me that all characters had some tragic/traumatic backstory that would later come as some big reveal. At some point I just wanted the VN to tell me what each heroine's deal was, not which order they are having their bath times in.
Additionally, using a character backstory as the main hook just isn't good storytelling imo because it's clear what kind of revelation is going to happen. If you already know there is going to be a sad backstory the only way to increase impact when the revelation happens is by adding shock value which is exactly what Grisaia no Kajitsu does. As I wrote above the backstories themselves are generally quite good, but most of the time they don't really add that much to their respective character arcs which (except for Sachi's and Michiru's route) consist of some random drama happening and Yuuji saving the day with his super soldier powers. It doesn't help that the heroines don't overcome their issues themselves but are more or less forced by Yuuji to learn their lessons. 
On that note I never really bought Yuuji falling in love with any of the girls since the difference in general capabilities is just too big and I also can't imagine him having a healthy romantic relationship with any one of them. Maybe the VN finds a way to pull this off well in the routes where I just watched the anime version, but judging on the Makina route where I found her and Yuuji's relationship just weird and unrealistic despite finding the premise kind of intriguing, I don't think I would change my mind.
I'm probably being way too harsh but for me personally Grisaia no Kajitsu just hit all the notes I hate in stories. If you don't have these issues, you're probably going to love it.
Regarding my issues with the overall pacing, I hoped the anime would do it better, but everywhere the VN is too slow, the anime rushes through things way too fast. After the first episode you already more or less knew what everyone's character twist was going to be and they had to cut so much out that it's hard to connect with any of the characters. If they had about 20-24 episodes to tell all the arcs it could have turned out well, but doing everything in just 13 episodes was a terrible choice.
Next up is Umineko which hopefully will be more to my taste.

I recently dropped Grisaia no Kajitsu after the first route (Makina) because I found it really disappointing. It's not terrible by any means and I can see why many people love it. Some of the comedy is great (I love Tuna-Fish Man), the characters are all interesting and a few of the backstories are really intense (I watched the anime after dropping the VN to at least know what the deal was Sachi and Amane, so I write about the routes I didn't read assuming the VN didn't drastically change after ~30 hours and the anime kept the basic storylines of the routes intact). The good ingredients never came together for me though, mainly because the ratio of SoL, foreshadowing and something actually happening was way to heavy on the former two. I didn't really dislike any of the scenes but every time one of them started with one of Yuuji's inner monologues (which was about 90% of the time) I thought "welp, nothing's gonna happen in this scene". I would probably have been fine with all the SoL if the VN wasn't constantly reminding me that all characters had some tragic/traumatic backstory that would later come as some big reveal. At some point I just wanted the VN to tell me what each heroine's deal was, not which order they are having their bath times in.
Additionally, using a character backstory as the main hook just isn't good storytelling imo because it's clear what kind of revelation is going to happen. If you already know there is going to be a sad backstory the only way to increase impact when the revelation happens is by adding shock value which is exactly what Grisaia no Kajitsu does. As I wrote above the backstories themselves are generally quite good, but most of the time they don't really add that much to their respective character arcs which (except for Sachi's and Michiru's route) consist of some random drama happening and Yuuji saving the day with his super soldier powers. It doesn't help that the heroines don't overcome their issues themselves but are more or less forced by Yuuji to learn their lessons. 
On that note I never really bought Yuuji falling in love with any of the girls since the difference in general capabilities is just too big and I also can't imagine him having a healthy romantic relationship with any one of them. Maybe the VN finds a way to pull this off well in the routes where I just watched the anime version, but judging on the Makina route where I found her and Yuuji's relationship just weird and unrealistic despite finding the premise kind of intriguing, I don't think I would change my mind.
I'm probably being way too harsh but for me personally Grisaia no Kajitsu just hit all the notes I hate in stories. If you don't have these issues, you're probably going to love it.
Regarding my issues with the overall pacing, I hoped the anime would do it better, but everywhere the VN is too slow, the anime rushes through things way too fast. After the first episode you already more or less knew what everyone's character twist was going to be and they had to cut so much out that it's hard to connect with any of the characters. If they had about 20-24 episodes to tell all the arcs it could have turned out well, but doing everything in just 13 episodes was a terrible choice.
Next up is Umineko which hopefully will be more to my taste.

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.

You're overreacting, but TBH, you'll be in monority pretty much anywhere on the Internet with how far your views go. I consider myself pretty progressive and I'm probably closer to you than Thyndd on this, but it's not like the progressive groups don't create intellectual aberrations of various sort, probletic political demands and institutional biases (those are of course much stronger in the opposite directions, at least in most places, but still). Things for people to criticise and while many blow it out of proportion or misunderstand the severity of the position some minorities are in, they aren't without legit arguements. 
Fuwa is a pretty tolerant place and the VN fandom, at worst, have some very progressive niches that are friendly to all kinds of diversity. You won't find much better than this over the internet, unless you close yourself in some kind of narrow, progressive echo-bubble. And that is never a healthy thing to do. 
And with the Attack Helicopter meme, I find it both questionable and genuinely funny, because it touches on various identity groups (ex. otherkin) and their public demands of respect that I personally find ridiculous. It's an interesting question whether there can exist a society of unlimited noncomformity, but people who ask me to take into account their identity as a dragon or gender identification I can't decipher even after my extended contact with feminist literature aren't helping the ligitimate opressed groups in their fight. 
This game, however, probably have little to do with all that - I'd be surprised if it was more than just something playing on the absurdity of out-of-context memes.

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

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.

I personally think that VNs are simply not a good formula for horror, at least not the "scary" type - you can have suspenseful moments in an average-lenght VN, but you can't reasonably keep it like that all the way through like you could with a movie. "Disturbing", on the other way, is something that VNs can do amazingly well, as evident by Saya no Uta, Lynne, Soundless, or even Clock Up titles (I don't think calling euphoria or Maggot Baits horrors would not be that much of a stretch). 
So, you'll more often see good VNs with horror themes/elements than straight up horrors, unless it's some kind of short, indie stuff. Also, what others said is very valid - it's moe and ero content that sells, you have some niche fetishes that work with horror, but generally, it's not what's the most profitable or "safest" to make. 

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.

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.

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.

This is everything my 16 year old self ever fucking wanted, holy fuck.
http://www.siliconera.com/2018/09/11/too-kyo-games-is-led-by-danganronpa-staff-and-zero-escape-series-creator/
Staff includes Kodaka, Masafumi Takada (Danganronpa's composer), Takumi Nakuzawa (who worked on Ever17 and directed Root Double), and Kotaro Uchikoshi (Ever17, Zero Escape).
http://www.siliconera.com/2018/09/11/too-kyo-games-first-projects-are-an-anime-and-a-couple-games-including-a-death-game-for-kids/
First project's being written by Uchikoshi and Kodaka (holy fuck) and has a theme of Extreme vs. Despair.
Concept art: 
Second project is an anime written by Kodaka and directed by Pierrot.
Concept art: 
Third project is a “A death game of children, by children, for children." (credit for the phrase goes to Siliconera)
Concept art: 
Fourth project is a "reasoning adventure" in a Too Kyo - Spike Chunsoft crossover.
Concept art: 
Credit for all info, art and wording goes to Siliconera (the two linked articles).
 

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

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. 

Oh boy, my best regards to you  See you at the end of Alternative.

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

JAST USA RPG sale: https://jastusa.com/sale

Under my umbrella, ella, ella, E E E
 
Oh, that one doesn't work in English...

I've reached the last route or "Saga" (as the VN calls is) of Cho Dengeki Stryker. As long as the writers don't mess that one up horribly the VN is a pretty fun read.
It's really good at mocking many of the tropes you would expect from a superhero vs. evil empire story aimed at children like the villains and protagonist living next door without recognizing each other in their civilian outfits. But it still manages to always take its characters serious enough to keep the reader engaged. The story gets darker than I expected (the whole Mirror thing is pretty messed up) which really helps the VN imo because this way it feels like there really is something at stake and it shakes up the black/white morals you often get in these kinds of stories. The only real weakness imo was Haruna's character because she is too one-dimensional and stereotypical for her importance to the overall plot, which weakens the impact of some of the more emotional scenes.
 

Welcome to my introduction thread and to fuwanovel of course!