Clephas

Mmm... that sentence doesn't really make much sense... if they had said 'ukete' rather than 'motte', it would have made a lot more sense. 'Please hold/take my respect.'

Tayutama is a good choice... I suggest you start with Mashiro or Mafuyu, as both their paths are interesting and good. Mashiro's differs greatly from the anime ending, and it is satisfying for people who hate the way Japanese treat immortal heroine paths most of the time.

Wow... if you'd just asked for 4 or a short game, I would have been able to do something... but decent games with a 4-rating are hard to find in the first place. Not to mention that 2-10 hours pretty much limits you to kinetic novels, which are in short supply in any case. Gothic Delusion comes to mind, but if I recall correctly, at its most difficult points it is a 6-7, with the normal conversation at a 4. Ideally, I'd provide you with a moege, but ironically, decent moege generally average 20 hours in length. If you were willing to settle for something that was linguistically easy but longer, I'd recommend Tayutama, simply because it is the first moege I played in Japanese... Mashiro's route would probably take me seven to eight hours to complete, if I included the common route, so technically it would be fulfilling your request if we were talking about only one route, lol. Not to mention that there is a lot of repeated text in the game, haha... To be blunt, if you ask for something decent that is 2-10 hours long, most of them are going to be hard linguistically. A lot of skilled writers prefer to write kinetic novels, which make up the greater majority of such games. With easy games, you are only going to see nukige and moege variations, which is why I generally suggest people start with a moege. This is despite the fact that I'm bored of moege, lol. The majority of the length of such games is the common route, with individual heroine routes generally only being two to three hours of reading on their own... not only that, but ones that can be read easily are pretty simple to find.

*gives the girl a shotgun, implants her with a control device, and directs her to slaughter random people in the streets* Welcome...

Welcome....

*transforms the loli into a giant cat, who promptly begins licking herself* Welcome.

*Clephas does the evil dance, calling on the spirits of eroge to bless MottainaiVN's arrival with an endless libido and thousands of pretty traps that will transform into pretty girls if he finds true love with them*

It is an utsuge, meaning it is meant to depress the reader, make him/her sad, etc. I haven't played it, but from everything I've seen on it, it screams utsuge with high sexual content (borderline nuki, but has too much story to quite make it). Also, I wouldn't suggest buying this kind of game unless you literally don't have anything else you are interested in.

The concept for this thread is simple... on request, I will attempt to recommend at least one VN for each person, based on whatever qualifications they put forth. I will not recommend more than three for each person (the top three I can think of). These VNs will universally be untranslated (see Kaguya's thread if you want translated games), so if you don't intend to learn Japanese, don't know Japanese, or don't think you have the ability to muddle through with a machine translation, I wouldn't recommend this thread for you. For those thinking to rely on a machine translator such as Atlas or Google translate, while I recommend against it, if you insist I will provide you with the best and most easily machine-translated VN titles meeting your standards that I can think of (these will utilize mostly simple writing with commonly-used kanji and kanji combos, thus making them easier for the translator machines to handle). However, be aware that any such titles I recommend will necessarily be of lower quality than those I would prefer to introduce. This is meant to be a help for those who have run out of translated VNs, want to avoid 'jirai' (horrible games that look good at a glance), or who aren't sure of where to start. Here, I will put down a suggested form for you to use. Genre: (chuuni, moege, charage, utsuge, nakige, story-focused) Linguistic level (from 1-10): (with the understanding anything below 4 is going to be very... bad) Stimulus preferred: (do you want to be stimulated emotionally, or do you want the game to make you think?) What is your list of no-nos?: (can you not stand blood, or maybe you have problems with idiot protags... put down what you don't want in the game here) Other:

*クレファスは’もえ’を燃やすことにした*　 クレファスから：　このメッセージを見て、笑ったものへ。。。　あなた方は翻訳家の素質があるんです！！！ なんちゃって、てへぺろ Welcome...

http://vndb.org/v9205 (non-ero, but I found the romance in it to be fairly mature, with its own logical progression, though there is a lot of melodrama in the game overall) http://vndb.org/v604 (this is one of my oldest favorites and the romances for the main school heroines - Miyabi, Donoko, and Shino are good, though the protag is a teacher so he goes through the usual 'teacher-student relationship' internal dilemma) http://vndb.org/v551 (All but one of the paths in this one are tragic, short-lived love, but what's there is very well-done, if somewhat melodramatic) http://vndb.org/v6411 (great game overall... though the true ending is somewhat harem-ish and there is a threesome ending in the 'sun school' endings)

lol... you pretty much eliminated all romance in VNs with those words. It's either goofy/harem or melodrama with VNs, for the most part. If I had to choose between the two, I'd do melodrama. Edit: This is mostly because human beings generally don't HAVE mature relationships, since it is the one thing people seem incapable of treating in an adult fashion.

Game of the month candidates for the November releases: http://vndb.org/v12487 (as this is chuuni, I'll be playing this first) http://vndb.org/v12795 (this will be the second one I play, because I liked the original) http://vndb.org/v12856 (Ensemble's games tend to vary greatly in quality, so I'm sort of wary of this one) http://vndb.org/v12981 (chuable's last game was awful, so I don't have much in the way of hopes for this one) http://vndb.org/v12982 (Alcot Honeycomb, and thus worth playing. I've yet to encounter a game by this company that didn't provide at least a decent level of entertainment) http://vndb.org/v12985 (debut title, might be a nukige, taking a chance on it anyway) http://vndb.org/v12988 (nekoneko soft and thus a chancy proposition... but I'll try it anyway) http://vndb.org/v12992 (low priority, since the parent company only makes nukige... but I heard this was intended to be a moege, so I'll try it and give my honest opinion, lol) http://vndb.org/v13260 (seems like your classic love-comedy, nothing to get excited about) http://vndb.org/r29096 (remake of a classic, so worth taking a look at) http://vndb.org/v9913 (previous games by this company sucked, but I'm giving it a chance) Edit: tbh, I'll probably only play the top three, the Alcot game, and the Kazoku Keikaku remake right away and wait for the others. I can only take so many moege in a single month, lol.

Welcome. If you've run out, feel free to learn Japanese so I can bombard you with suggestions, lol. I'll be happy to drown you in an endless sea of VNs that will corrupt your soul and make you over into someone who will never look at a 3D woman/man/it again.

lol, I would feel the same way... except I know the price of putting homework off all too well, from my early college days (and dropout) a decade past. Do your homework, get it over with, and enjoy your gaming with a free heart and soul... it is a lot more pleasant that way all around. My new school life can be defined by these simple words: 'Get it over with as fast as possible.'

Ok, I'll take it as a given that yall are playing VNs in at least some of your free time... but just what causes you to make the decision to play a visual novel? I play them when: I'm not interested in actual gameplay/want a story, while I eat, to take a break from work.

I don't mind moe... though I don't like it when it is the whole point of what you are watching/reading/playing. Anime like Kiddy Grade manage to balance great story with fanservice and extreme moe, but ones like K-on exist solely for the sake of moe. Games like Uruwashi no possess moe factors, but their story is the main point. However, ones like Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka exist solely to moe you to death.

It is a tsundere-fest, yes. Well, except the maid. She's not tsundere... rather she enjoys screwing with the protagonist's head.

Makura's games tend to have slightly weird characters and character-relationships. This game isn't an exception. I liked the maid's route and the vice-president's route the best, personally. The protag is your standard donkan protag, though he is perhaps more capable than your average protag. His intelligence is average, but he works hard to make up for his flaws and to satisfy those who place their trust in him. The paths tend to vary in degrees of drama - in particular, the vice-president;s path has some interesting twists - but as moege go, this is a good choice.

I think FFT took more risks... FFXII was born of an abortive attempt at imitating it because they were based in the same world. The ideas and non-physical setting of the game were interesting, but the way they told the story and its progression varied from boring to absolutely senseless.

Corporate influence - in particular, the idea of 'mainstream appeal' - is the greatest threat to good stories. I state this as a fact rather than a simple opinion. Efforts to appeal to wider and wider audiences have a bad habit of creating stories that have a disturbing degree of similarity (most moege are exactly like all other moege, as are the various sub-genres of nukige). If you want an example of this influence in the regular video game industry, Final Fantasy is a rather obvious one. Originally, FF was a major series in a niche genre that pandered to its fanbase unashamedly... but when jrpgs showed a possibility of becoming part of the mainstream, they immediately acted to 'widen its appeal', resulting in Final Fantasy X, which, while and admittedly awesome game, also was the game that killed the traditional 'overworld map' and introduced 'on the rails' environments. To be blunt, the element of world exploration was lost from most jrpgs after that, because it was found to be much easier to blur things on geography and pass the players through a tunnel that looked like a wide-open field. By the time Final Fantasy XII came out, all traces of creativity had been eliminated from the story-writing, leaving a rather bland narrative and a rather pathetic reliance on 'cutting edge visuals' and voice-acting to cover it up. For anime... so many examples, but if I had to pick one that stands out as a 'standard' for predictable and bland story-writing... sorry, too many to name. The existence of moeblob comes to mind, as do your standard 'love-comedy' anime... but you can see the effects of over-farming of the same ideas in the simple fact that we are lucky to see three decent anime series come out in a single year now. That said, it is kind of funny that they spend so much time chasing that illusionary mainstream appeal, since all it is doing is making people want unique or niche products.

lol... they are talking about Western games, and they are full of BS. If anything, game stories have gotten progressively crappier in the last four to five years. If you are talking about decent plots in Western games, the Mass Effect trilogy is an example of godliness... and there are plenty of jrpgs pre-2006 that had great stories (even if they later became tropes and cliches). Anyone who says this is the age of 'video games with story' hasn't been paying attention for the past seventeen years or so... Edit: The fact that most of the ideas from the Last of Us were stolen from a certain post-apocalyptic book series that I won't name here is so bloody obvious that I have to laugh when people say the story is unique.

Visual novels mean different things to different people. For some they are a source of plots that anime writers can't afford to try (due to corporate restrictions), for others they are a way to satisfy gratuitous moe lust, and for yet others they are simply yet another excuse to fap. What are visual novels to you? In my case, VNs were an epiphany, originally. In my mind, no medium so effectively appeals to the mind through the written word, visual input, and aural input as well. The medium has a potential for storytelling that far surpasses any existing medium, for those who prefer to use their imagination but also want an experience (as opposed to books, where the reader's imagination is the greater part of the experience). Later, I grew to appreciate how this niche medium was free - to an extent - from the corruption of excessive corporate intervention. This was because production costs for a medium-quality (visual and audio) are far lower than the costs of a normal video game's development. This also makes indie production cheaper and easier. Of course, the sheer number of moege and nukige out there show the ubiquitous presence of the corporate world's overpowering influence even here, but I've experienced stories from VNs that would never have survived the scrutiny an anime or a traditional video game story undergoe from their corporate slave masters. This, in itself, proves the value of the medium, despite the glut of low-quality moege and nukige out there.

*injects the loli with the 'homicidal nekololi ninja virus', which turns all lolis infected with it into homicidal nekololi ninjas who perform meaninglessly cool murders at random* Welcome...

I won't make any suggestions until you've trespassed in my territory (untranslated vns), but I do welcome you to Fuwa.