Clephas

Honestly? I got over caring about other people's (irl) opinions years ago. Though, I'm not stupid enough to reveal I'm playing games with erotic content to my family, since half are parochial Christians and the other half are... earthy people who wonder why I'm not married with seven kids.

It's basically the same thing as when people couldn't tell the difference between anime and manga and western cartoons and comics.

I cherry-picked VNs at first... but then I started just playing anything that looked even vaguely interesting. After a while, it gets hard to remember most of them. Moege especially tend to run into one another, since so many are carbon copies of earlier games with minor twists. To be blunt, I've read most of the best and tons of medium-quality (I got really good at screening VNs, really fast) VNs... but out of the four hundred or so I've played, maybe forty to fifty are truly worth being hyped, whereas the rest are usually... not so. I sometimes go back to old games I played before at random (like I did with Inpyuri) and replay them to confirm whether they were as good as I remember. Fortunately, in most cases, I had good taste even in the beginning, lol.

lol... that explains why their multiplayer market tends to be adhoc playing on portables for the most part.

What I don't get is why all those crappy Korean MMO's make it over here and interesting Japanese ones like that don't get localized here... The more action-packed type definitely suits the American preference, so it kind of amazes me that we don't see more of this type making the move over here. Edit: Sorry, every MMO I've played has been basically a WoW clone... even if it seemed otherwise on the surface. I don't want variations on that extremely tedious theme... I want something where I actually have fun, rather than just waste time, lol

Utwarerumono's battle system is not a good one. It is a basic srpg system, without the benefit of being able to grind between battles to get underleveled characters to where you want them. Considering the heavy focus on story in a VN/srpg, they would have been much better off just giving everyone the same amount of exp every battle, rather than focusing it on those who did the damage and killed the enemies. That would have allowed you to keep a full party of characters without adding in the need to grind. TtT's battle system is basically a partial and half-assed rip-off of the Growlanser series, without the benefit of letting you alter the course of the game through how you act/win your battles. As such, I mostly saw the game's faults when I played it. Leaf's penchant for stealing battle systems imperfectly is easily its worst habit, and I honestly think its games are overrated, not underrated.

Uruwashi no... having to chose anyone other than Donoko or Miyabi.

With a lot of the Japanese second-hand shops, the gamers who sell them are people who bought multiple copies for the shop tokuten and then sold them unopened to the second-hand shop. The more fanatical otaku gamers will buy five or six copies of the same game, keep one, display one, and sell the rest after getting the shop tokuten.

That's why you pre-order. If you pre-order and pick it up in a timely manner, you get your sealed game. In any case, every used game retailer I've been to does it differently. One marked it down by five percent for it being open and another basically took photos of the cover and stuck them in empty cases.

Mmm... one of the first couple of choices in Devils Devel Concept is sort of like that. Since the protag gets confessed to by Kanata in like the third scene, you have to choose to turn her down if you want one of the other heroines or her path with her dominant (rather than Sora), and the way he does it is... so like him.

I'd rather shoot

I'm Chaotic Evil, of course (with the exception that I don't like rapegames).

I haven't been able to find a live download of the full version, so I decided not to bother, since I wasn't all that interested in the first place.

Mmm... I finished the common route and all four heroine routes in just under nine hours.

VN-players are chaotic neutral or true neutral for the most part, lol.

Just finished replaying http://vndb.org/v11686 by Rosenbleu, and here are a few thoughts. 1. Like all Rosenbleu games, this game is hilarious. I've literally never encountered a Rosenbleu game that didn't make me burst out laughing at least once. 2. Great heroines: Mikoto and Miyabi especially are extremely good as heroines (not to diss Asuka or Shizune... but those two were my favorites). Mikoto's 'kogitsune' mode when she's in love with the protag is... ridiculously cute. So much so that I broke one of my rules and actually fell in love with a loli for a second time. Miyabi... is just rofl. If it weren't for the sub-character Shiroko's antics, you'd think she was yandere, but she's just really, really fixated on the protagonist. 3. Here's the downside... this game is way too short. This is Rosenbleu's one bad habit. Their games are even shorter than some straight moege (though they compress more into that time than most of those). In addition, the epilogues don't really do any of the heroines justice (god, they are like fifty lines...). Worse, Mikoto's and Asuka's routes are rather anticlimactic in comparison to Miyabi's and Shizune's, because of a difference in focus (the latter two are focused more on the protag's problems and the story that springs from that, but that story isn't properly addressed in either Mikoto or Asuka's routes). Overall? It's a really amusing game with a letdown ending and individual paths. It's more lighthearted, overall, than even the Tiny Dungeon games.

If you are looking for something portable and have a PSP or Vita, I suggest Growlanser IV (the port/remake of the ps1 game). It is very high quality, from a series by Atlus (makers of Persona and the rest of the SMT series).

I guess the biggest problem with Michiru is that they never manage to succeed in making her anything other than comic relief. Even in the second and third game, she is more of a 'comforter' even in her more serious role than a real character. The rather hilarious way she becomes central in the epilogue of the third only makes it clearer that she is basically 'the one character that never really changes'. She provides a sense of continuity that helps keep the character dynamics from the first game alive in the second and third one. This is important when you are making a series with a continuous story... but it has the downside of sending any possibility of her being anything other than an idiot down the toilet.

Believe me, it really is that bad. There is no such thing as a good machine translator. The best they can manage is non-abstract individual words. When it comes to grammar or abstract concepts... *Clephas grimaces* From experience, I know that most efforts at translating Japanese are closer to 'approximation' than most would like to admit. At least part of this is because the Japanese quite simply don't think like Westerners. There are tons of subtle cultural and regional differences - not to mention the experiences and conditions that formed them in the first place - that have made their language into something that is fundamentally out of sync with English. Yes, some things translate nicely... but even more things don't. Edit: I've said this in other threads, but this can't really be emphasized enough... I'm a subtly different person when I'm thinking in Japanese. Languages are one of the largest building blocks of a culture, and when you learn a language, it broadens your horizons... and at the same time makes you realize how different what you've just learned is from what you were born into. It was gradual enough for me that it wasn't much of a shock to my system, but people that don't understand Japanese without the filter of 'mental translation' really aren't equipped to comprehend just how different the thought processes behind the languages are.

That's true, more or less. tbh, though... until we start building colonization ships in orbit, we really should be enforcing population controls in developed nations to keep consumption under control. People are too stupid to think in the long-term, for the most part (heck, if I hadn't seen the results of failing to save money in my own family so many times, I wouldn't have put together such an insane early-retirement plan). However, eventually people are going to come face to face with the results of failing to think in the long term... namely human extinction (worst-case scenario) or the reduction of civilization to pre-electricity levels over much of the world (quite likely, in another century). Worse, when you factor in the nutrition problems, loss of arable land, and the sinking cities and islands from global warming... it really isn't long-term at all (unless you are stupid enough to think that a mere fifteen to twenty years in the future is the long-term). Believe me, fifteen to twenty years is a drop in the bucket... I hardly noticed most of the last twenty-five years passing, in subjective terms, and I remember how I thought I'd probably die of a heart attack from clogged veins long before we saw the North Pole get to the point of no return (which it is at now). Unfortunately, I'm still alive (though as fat and doughy as ever), and it is sad to say, almost all the predictions they made back then have come true... frequently faster than they said they would. So what is this rant about? Mandatory birth control implants, of course *Clephas looks at everyone else reading the thread as if they are idiots who should have read where he was going with this long before, despite the fact that he never hinted at it*. We need to implant everyone with birth control, or sterilize them (one or the other) so that the Illu- *coughs* concerned parties can assure the prosperity of humanity.

Michiru is Michiru. She is what is called 'boke-tantou', or a character whose sole role in the game is to serve as a source of cheap laughs. That is why she has no redeeming value as a character... but no one doubts that she is a good person at heart, either. Quite frankly, she is too simple-minded to do anything evil, so everyone can sit back, relax, and use her as occasional relief from the rather... extreme atmosphere of the second and third game.

Also, those interface patches are basically someone punching the letters through a machine translator, approximating what comes out, then sticking it on screen. They aren't that good in the first place, in other words. The groups that made them have neither the capabilities nor the wherewithal to do a decent translation of the main game (heck, they'd probably stumble over an anime meant for small children), and asking 'can you translate the rest of the game?' is like asking a pygmy to get the cereal down from above the fridge.

Research into the way our food crops are responding to changing climate conditions has caused scientists to conclude that staple crops will be less nutritious, the warmer our climate gets. That means every ear of corn, loaf of bread, and sack of rice will feed fewer people. If anything, it is going to be all science can do to keep food production matching the current population, without some kind of dramatic advances.

Eushully's games have more text than the average VN, so it takes a lot of... courage to even consider translating one.

Actually, INCREASING the population is wrong, from a simple long-term point of view. Our current infrastructure (including natural resources such as water) are currently strained to the breaking point by our unnecessarily large populations, especially in cities. Japan suffered from that problem early, and it was one of the factors that has effected that 'I don't really want to have kids' mentality amongst the youth over there. China is having the same problem, especially in its northern provinces. Europe suffers from it as well (it's actually much worse there than it is here), and so does Australia (because so little of their land is arable in the first place). To be blunt, we need some kind of bio-engineered plague or lots of nukes to rapidly reduce our population to something manageable so that the illumi- I mean, conscientious human beings can run the world properly. (Edit: The last part was a joke, but I really am serious about population being a problem. Part of it is that Christianity and Islam, two of the largest faiths, promote population expansion, but it is also because kids just don't die in infancy like they used to... so too many people survive to adulthood)