Seraphim

Tried changing to Direct3D and that did wonders for the framerate, but it also made everything extremely pixelated; even more so than when I lowered the native resolution of my monitor. This game just doesn't seem to mesh well with my computer.

Are all the characters with sprites supposed to have portraits by the chat box if everything works properly? Rise (the pink-haired girl) is actually the only one that has been showing for me so far. EDIT: I checked some screenshots (was hesistant about doing that, since I've been spoiled that way before) and it seems there usually aren't any portraits by the chat box; not even for other heroines. Not sure what the point of having one for Rise is then, especially if there's the risk of it glitching out like this.

I can't recall hearing anything about something like that either. You sure you're not confusing it with Article 13 and its censorship enforcement for copyright claims on the interwebz?

Started reading Princess Evangile, and man, this must be the worst VN I've played since School/Shiny Days, from a technical standpoint. I've had to lower my resolution to the point where I can clearly distinguish individual pixels from over two meters away, and it's still stuttering whenever there's some sort of movement. Just out of curiousity, is the fact that one person's portrait stays next to the chat box while others are speaking intentional or is it some glitch caused by the godawful game engine? It seems a bit odd. An example: The girl with the pink hair isn't the one speaking here, but her portrait's still showing. This one's even more confusing: There's one person centered on-screen while another one's portrait is shown and yet another one is actually speaking.

Finished a few VNs since my last post here, so here are some impressions! True Remembrance The music and overall ambience of the game reminded me a lot of Symphonic Rain, which is one of my favorite VNs. Also, while it might not matter much to most people, I'm a sucker for movies, games, etc taking place during winter, so that was a big plus for me. All in all, it was a solid read. Our Lovely Escape This one was a bit of a mess. Everyone seems pretty normal at first glance, but then they just randomly start acting really strange out of nowhere. (Like when It's clear that the developer was going for some sort of shock value, but it just comes off as desperate and feels really stupid. A few other complaints: - The character sprites and CG art don't match very well. They kinda seem like different people. For example, at one moment a character looks like this and the next, they look like this. - There are a bunch of CGs that are animated for no reason (the characters aren't actually moving in the scene) and a bunch of CGs that would make sense to animate (the h-scenes, mainly) are not. - Choices are completely nonsensical. For example, which girl the protagonist ends up sleeping with and falling in love with is literally determined based on what you decide to eat for lunch. - Some of the endings are extremely sudden. Just when things start heading in a somewhat interesting direction; BOOM, the game just abruptly ends and you're thrown back to the title menu. The Way We All Go I think it's a decent VN at its core, but there are three things that lower my overall impression. 1. The dialogue and narration is way too bloated and repetitive. They could easily cut like 30% of the text from the game without having it negatively affecting the story. 2. "Atcchan" is one of the most spineless and pathetic excuses for a protagonist I've ever seen. He never speaks his mind and he's constantly cowering/apologizing to avoid conflict even when people are being rude to him for no valid reason or insulting his friends. Add to that how he treated his so called "best friend" like shit (by moving to another city without even mentioning it, as well as not contacting her even once for two years, although he kept in touch with his other friend that entire time) and you've got yourself one utterly unlikable SOB. 3. The fact that It makes it hard to truly sympathize with her and what she's gone through, even though that is obviously what we're expected to do. I'm sure this could have been handled in a better way; one that doesn't render Sad Backstory™ irrelevant. Chemically Bonded I've seen several people claim this is a "brilliant" visual novel with a "great story", but I simply can't agree. Yes, it sounds compelling on paper (the synopsis on the Steam page was what initially caught my attention), but in reality, it ended up being one of the most boring VNs I've ever read. The story revolves around a friendship that has crumbled, and you, as the protagonist, get involved to try to make them reconcile. Mending a broken relationship seems like a promising premise, but it turned out to all be caused by a dumb misunderstanding that took like 10 seconds to clear up once they finally got around to doing it. Everything leading up to that point was basically just a lot of beating around the bush, repeating similar scenes and dialogue over and over again with little to no actual development in the story. The same goes for afterwards. It felt like they were just going through motions and doing this and that as filler to extend the playtime. I would much rather have had a more focused story that ended in 2-3 hours. In addition, there's the issue of one of the girls, who's also a love interest for the protagonist, being a major annoyance. She's supposed to be a tsundere, but she's leaning so heavily towards the tsun side, constantly berating and throwing completely uncalled for verbal abuse at the protagonist, that it's impossible for me to find her endearing on the few occasions she starts acting dere. The fact that they're repeatedly referring to Naomi as a "tsundere" even in the narration makes it really obvious that the developer was going for that specifically, and that also solidifies her status as just a fictional stereotype rather than give her actual depth and resemblance to a real person. The same goes for the protagonist, who has one of the most hollow personalities I've ever seen in a visual novel. We know next to nothing about him (I mean, he doesn't even have a name); he's basically just an empty shell with the sole purpose of acting as some kind of middleman in Naomi's and Kiyoko's relationship. The only character that can be considered somewhat normal is Kiyoko, but she becomes more or less irrelevant due to how the other two are. A story about a relationship between three people doesn't work very well when two of those three seem like artificial constructs. As for other complaints, there's English voice acting, but it's mediocre at best and the voices don't suit the characters very well. Also, the sound quality is noticeably worse than that of the music, with interference caused by what I can only assume is a lack of pop filter on the microphone during recording. Furthermore, the characters keep stuttering all the time, and the voice actors articulate every stutter, making the dialogue sound forced and unnatural. Sweetest Monster I successfully predicted the plot twist early on and must say that I think there was a little too much foreshadowing. Nevertheless, the dialogue was well written and the narration built a great horror/mystery atmosphere along with the music. It's too bad though that none of the characters were very likeable, because that sort of lessened the impact of everything that happened to them.

Well, until it has been confirmed, this is all speculation. It would be very disappointing and a step in the wrong direction if it turns out to actually be a case of geoblocking, but I guess you could always find some other way to play the games if you want to.

Whenever their company name is mentioned, I always think of this:

I couldn't resist the urge to create a GIF when I saw this screenshot in Carpe Diem: Reboot.

Yeah, Acting Lessons is better, but I think we'll have to await the full release of Being a DIK before we can really compare the two. I mean, this is just the beginning of the story, so a lot can happen. As for Derek, I also hated him at first, but he grew on me after a while and I expect to see him evolve a bit over the upcoming seasons. (Liam seemed pretty shallow too at first but turned out to be a great character.) One of my biggest issues with the game is the fact that

After devoting my time to a bunch of lenghty VNs lately, I opted to change things up by reading some shorter ones. Here's some input on them, in order of completion: Ambre - a heartbreaking kinetic novel The fact that they're using "heartbreaking" as a selling point in the title made me a bit skeptical, and rightfully so, it turned out. The main plot twist was too obvious, and despite the game only being somewhere between 60-90 minutes long, it still managed to feel repetitive, because you're forced to view the same events all over again after said plot twist has been unveiled. Furthermore, while rather well-written, the narration feels needlessly convoluted. I like variation as much as the next guy, but they kinda went overboard here. At times, it felt like the writer was just randomly piecing together fancy words in an attempt to make it sound like there was some deeper meaning there, when, in truth, there wasn't. The Language of Love One of the most wholesome and adorable slice of life VNs I've read to date. I really liked the character design. The eyes, in particular, look great; especially when compared to the lifeless eyes in Baldr Sky, which I finished a few weeks ago. I also have to say that it was nice to not be stuck in high school for once, and relationships with single mothers aren't exactly commonplace either, at least when we're talking non-fetish titles. Furthermore, it was oddly refreshing to see a character who makes average-tasting food. (It's usually one of two extremes; either really tasty or bad to the point of basically turning into coal.) I've had several of ebi-hime's VNs in my wishlist for a while now, and I intend to look into some of those other ones in the near future. She actually released a new one, The End of an Actress, just a week ago and it seems interesting. (Sidenote: The dude in the screenshots reminds me of Jacopo in Fata Morgana.) missed messages. This one caught my eye due to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on Steam. I tend to be skeptical whenever I see that for a title I've never heard of before, and I was even more so this time around due to the fact that there's a mention of "memes" in the game description. However, just as was the case with Acting Lessons a couple of months ago, this turned out to be a worthwhile experience. It's really short - just 30-or-so minutes to complete all four endings - but it somehow still managed to make me develop an emotional bond with the characters. The artstyle is cool and the psychedelic music fits the ambience of the game rather well. I wouldn't have minded paying for this title, so the fact that it's completely free is all the more reason to give it a chance. Carpe Diem This received a major visual overhaul at the end of last year, and judging by the old screenshots on VNDb, it now looks a lot better. In any case, this is probably the shortest VN I've ever read, clocking in at around 10 minutes playtime. While "missed messages" (referring to the VN above) managed to, despite a lack of information, make me care for the characters to a decent extent in a remarkably short time, this VN ultimately failed to do so. The twist at the end felt interesting enough to warrant giving the direct sequel, Carpe Diem: Reboot, a go, though. So, without further ado... Carpe Diem: Reboot Leaps and bounds above the original, but that doesn't really say much, considering the lack of substance in that one. To make things a bit clearer, let's just say that this wasn't anything special either. The scenes leading up to the twist in the original are replayed at the start of Reboot, so right off the bat, the original becomes kinda redundant. The art (mainly the character art) is better this time around, and there's even English voice acting; something I've only seen in a couple of VNs before. Problem is, there's only English voice acting, so if you find it awkward, like I did, you'll have to turn off voices completely. The slice of life scenes were rather nice, but all that stuff about and whatnot that they started spewing later on felt out of place and unnecessary. I don't really see the point of adding that when the story could easily have stood well enough on its own with the prerequisites it started out with, but I guess it's all just meant as a setup for the true ending, which was equal parts depressing and disappointing. The two choices that determine whether you get the good ending or the true one shouldn't influence the story progression in the way that they do. Despite the choices being more or less entirely irrelevant, the contrast was like night and day, and the protagonist started acting really out of character for seemingly no reason whatsoever. The ending is a prime example of forced drama and solidified my opinion of Jung as one of the worst protagonists ever. Being a DIK: Season 1 Honestly, I kinda regret playing this. Not because it's not good, because it most certainly is, but because it's unfinished. I was under the impression that the seasons would have individual conclusions as parts of a greater, overarching story keeping them all together, but that turned out to not be the case. No matter which choices you make over the course of the game, you'll inevitably just end up with a bunch of questions that won't be answered for a long time, possibly several years (considering the fact that DrPinkCake has said that he plans to make somewhere between 10-20 episodes in total, which would equal 3-5 seasons). The game itself is great, just as expected, with the same type of humor as in Acting Lessons. The story isn't quite as dark as Acting Lessons, but there's still drama and I expect it will escalate rapidly in the upcoming seasons. The characters aren't as relatable for me as the ones in Acting Lessons, due to the college life theme and age difference, but the developer does a good job at making you care about them nonetheless. One of my main concerns is that there are so many choices and branching paths in this first season alone that I honestly have no idea how DrPinkCake is going to be able to piece everything together without cutting a few corners in the end. Hopefully, he won't do something among the lines of what the Walking Dead game series did. Depraved Awakening While Acting Lessons and Being a DIK are storydriven games with sex scenes mixed into the plot to spice things up, Depraved Awakening feels more like a porn game with some plot added for good measure to lead the player into the next sex scene. Sure, the noir approach is a bit interesting, but it didn't manage to keep me interested enough to actually care about the story. The same goes for most of the characters, who feel pretty hollow; the protagonist included. Some of the stuff happening was really stupid, like Moments like that make it hard to take the story seriously and it really cements this title as a porn game through and through. Kill or Love Another free VN. I don't have much to say about this one other than that it wasn't anything to write home about. It did, weirdly enough, still somehow manage to keep me entertained for the two-or-so hours it lasted, which I assume might be because I haven't read that many VNs with yanderes in them, so it felt a bit fresh despite some awkward story developments and blatantly obvious plot twists. I originally planned to give Totono a go by now, but what with the last minute delay until May, I'll have to improvise a bit and take on another project. We'll see where I end up.

I'd actually rank Sora last out of all the heroines, mainly for three reasons:

Just FYI, if you've got a PS4, there are a bunch of Japanese games on sale on PS Store right now, including 428: Shibuya Scramble for $9.99, Utawarerumono: Deception and Truth Bundle for $14.99, Chaos;Child for $11.99 and Psycho-Pass for $5.99, among others.

I also went with 428. As a matter of fact, I'm playing it right now and I'm enjoying both the story and its quirkiness a lot. Chaos;Child is great as well, but you should play Chaos;Head first to fully appreciate it. I imagine the same goes for Utawarerumono. At the very least, the only reason I haven't played MoD/MoT myself yet is because I'm awaiting the remake of the original, which will be released in a few months. I haven't played Psycho-Pass yet, but it's supposed to be pretty mediocre, so it's definitely the least interesting title out of the four listed.

You can probably count yourself among the lucky ones then! During my hours of troubleshooting, I noticed quite a few other people who ran into various problems while using Windows 10 in particular. The thing that turned out to work best for me in the end was completely ditching Windows 10 and playing on Windows 7 instead (compatibility mode in Windows 10 wasn't enough), but even then I would still get frequent crashes if I tried playing in fullscreen mode. (I should mention that this mostly concerns Shiny Days. School Days wasn't quite as unstable, although it definitely suffered from more crashes than I would deem acceptable.) There are some cases where certain VNs seem to play completely fine for some people, despite being broken messes for others. For example, I've heard people state that One and Moon won't play on Windows 10, but both of those ran without any issues at all for me.

It's worth pointing out that even if the hardware's good enough, there are some VNs that run really bad (or possibly not at all) on Windows 10. The first that comes to mind is School Days/Shiny Days. The constant crashes and freezes I suffered through when playing those VNs could probably serve well as some sort of torture method to extract information from basically anyone.

Noble Works isn't bad per se, but it isn't very good either. It never reaches any extreme, but rather manages to stay somewhere at the line inbetween, ultimately ending up as quite a forgettable experience. The premise for the story sounded more interesting than the VN itself turned out to be, so I think there was some missed potential here.

Heh, I had totally forgotten that a mention of Depraved Awakening was what initially brought us into that conversation. I guess it's less a case of it going under my radar, and more one of me having a faulty memory unit then.

This one has gone completely under my radar, just like basically all other 3D EVNs (Acting Lessons was my first and so far only one). It sounds interesting enough, so I picked it up on Steam just now and will probably read it when I'm done with Evenicle in the next week or so!

It's definitely not out of the question! You might want to have an ambulance on standby if you decide to try it out!

I honestly knew very little about it. I've just seen a bunch of people recommend it, and since it has a decent rating on VNDb, I figured it would be worth a go. I'll keep playing for now since it, despite my complaints, is rather fun, but I hope the protagonist's vocabulary evolves somewhat over the course of the game. The "cute" barrage coming from his mouth could lead to some serious cases of alcohol poisoning if used as the basis of a drinking game.

Finished Baldr Sky yesterday, and sadly, it didn't live up to my expectations. The final/true route managed to fall completely flat and made me uninterested to the point where I didn't really care about what happened to any of the characters. Quite an impressive feat, considering how much I enjoyed the other routes. (Well, I guess it's not that uncommon for Japanese works to start off interesting and then fail to deliver in the end due to going way over the top, adding too much nonsense and whatnot.) I also have to say that this is one of the worst gaming experiences of my life. Every moment the story wasn't progressing was more or less just a pain in the ass. I didn't enjoy the combat one bit, and it didn't exactly help that the text skip function was more or less useless, so I was forced to wade through repeating content for hours on end as I progressed through the different routes. I probably had to spend at least 20-30 hours on manually going through stuff I'd already read, just because it wasn't properly flagged as such in subsequent routes. Not exactly my idea of fun. Anyway, I'm done with that now and have started playing Evenicle. Does the story get interesting later on? I've only finished chapter 1, but so far it's just been some shallow plot mixed with rape and the protagonist going around calling girls cute every 10 seconds. (Perverted protagonists really aren't my cup of tea, and it's one of the main reasons I'm skeptical about delving into the Rance series.) It's kinda annoying that there's no gamepad support, and I don't understand why there has to be unit bars covering 30% of the screen at all times. (It would have made sense if there were real-time battles or as a way to mask a 4:3 resolution while converting the game to 16:9, but that isn't the case.) /end of whining

Kinda disappointing that we're missing out on Reflection Blue, which releases in Japan in a few months and has a ton of new content, but I guess I'll take what I can get. Been wanting to read this for a while now!

I second this. I'd say Rin's route is either hit or miss; more so than any other route in Katawa Shoujo. The people who like it seem to really love it, but for everyone else, it ends up being pretty "meh". I think one of the main reasons is that a lot of people, myself included, find it a bit hard to relate to her personality and problems, which in turn makes it difficult to get truly immersed in the story.

Is the school life reminiscence stuff worth the bother? There's supposedly some new content there, but it mostly seems to consist of stuff that I've already read in the main story and it feels like a pain in the ass to go through since the skip function doesn't work and there are no indicators for what's new and what isn't.

Well, there are quite a few of them, so I'll just go ahead and list the ones that came to mind first. in SubaHibi in Grisaia in ef in Rewrite All of these hit me pretty hard, but I think the one from SubaHibi affected me the most. I still get depressed whenever I think back on it.