Clephas
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Blog Comments posted by Clephas
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Sorry, I'm not interested in adding anymore rpgs to my backlog... much less shotacon reverse-rape...
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Propeller's original non-action VN it is... though I will at least consider dragging the others out of my backlog (my sources couldn't find any useable - reasonably priced - copies of Lost Child... I already have Abandoner).
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Escu;de isn't very good at doing human heroines and everyday life scenes... most of their games are gameplay-focused, with story taking a very distant third on their list of priorities (behind the H, in some cases). Story-wise, Kuon's path is the best in their entire lineup, which probably says a lot about them in general.
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I'm not really all that fond of Asa Project's games though... they tend to be extremely retro-moege types, which isn't necessarily bad but not something I'd want to go out and play.
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Mmm... there really isn't any huge potential to this VN. Looking back on it, I had to laugh, because it felt like a joke at the end. However, as an experience it isn't something I'd go out of the way to play.
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What really pisses me off is that as long as you keep to those (extremely well-known) rules of the sub-genre, it is so easy to make a first-class trap protagonist charage, nakige, or straight moege. By definition, having the protagonist be a trap means that self-insert isn't going to work for most people anyway, so you are better off making the protagonist have a unique or strong personality instead of a flat cipher. I honestly don't get why they did such an unprofessional job with this one.
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Mmm... the market has been oversaturated for years, but I think the real problem is that people are actually buying fewer VNs over there in general, due to the rise in sales taxes. That results in companies concluding they will get less money per work, thus giving them little reason to spend extra to produce masterpieces when cookie-cutter moege sell well.
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Clephas, what do you expect from August's new title?
Nothing? In my experience, games by August tend to start out good and fall flat about two thirds of the way through.
Edit: Not saying that to be a bastard... but beginning with Fortune Arterial, I've yet to play an August game that didn't follow that pattern or have some major flaw that made me go insane with rage.
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Definitely a title I'm very interested in when I can go untl'd.
Out of curiosity, do you think it would do better in terms of finding its audience as a traditional book considering its themes?
It is hard to say... While the narration in this one is very strong, there is also an immense amount of variation to Ami-related art. She has more varying expressions and poses than any of the other characters, and her varying smiles are one of the reasons she is so scary.
Also, it is the contrast between the paths that makes up the exploration of philosophy, to one degree or another, and by nature, split-path printed novels just don't work all that well.
Edit: Here is a quote, 'It is easier for an idiot to obtain happiness in most situations' ~Kamio Ami
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Those are the two non-nukige released for June.
This, which looks like a normal game on the cover, is actually just a rapegame. From what some friends of mine over there said, it is listed as a game designed to appeal to NTR and rape-lovers, not as a mystery, though there is a mystery element to it, apparently.
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One Ryuukishi VN every two years is my limit.
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出る杭を打つ is drawn from a Japanese saying that is basically the opposite of the American saying 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'. He is taking an even larger risk than Sanahtlig is hinting at by saying this. Japanese companies in general do not take kindly to their employees putting the company out there on a limb, and the industry already suffered badly as a whole from the infamous Rapelay incident and a number of follow-up incidents.
I don't think those of us over here can really comprehend the pressures the average Japanese companies are under. For one thing, social pressure can turn into economic pressure with alarming swiftness over there. For another, Japan is reliant enough on other countries' trade for its survival that these kind of scandals overseas can cause hysterical reactions from their lawmakers. The eroge industry, being a niche industry by nature, is vulnerable to crackdowns in a way that the car and food production industries aren't. Since eroge are basically a guilty pleasure and a luxury, there are plenty of lawmakers that wouldn't see a problem with doing away with them if it meant they could improve their own chances of remaining in office. It isn't like they are universally accepted, even by otakus... so before you criticize eroge-makers for being 'xenophobic', you should at least try to see the bind they are in.
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Been meaning to play Rose Gun Days for the longest time, it's on my backlog of things I want to read but never find the time.
Sweet review
Thanks... I'll be honest and say that I think I drove Kaguya and some others up the wall with my bitching and moaning while I played it, especially after one of my favorite characters got killed (I pulled one of my last hairs out after that). This one, even moreso than Ryuukishi's other VNs, is really going to pick its readers. It is really obvious that there are Cowboy Bebop influences to certain characters (Leo being the most obvious).
Ryuukishi shows some (a lot of) ignorance when it comes to history that is a bit exasperating... and some of the more loveable characters get themselves killed along the way. However, if you can live with the flaws and the pseudo (possibly real) grief from character deaths, it is a fairly good experience.
Edit: I seriously do not recommend playing the third season before the Last Season gets translated, because the way the game is structured means that each season ends right in the middle of an arc.
Edit 2: Whoops, didn't realize the last season had been translated...
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I should say that this game's strongest plot is involved with Kuon's route, though most of the routes have some kind of interesting aspect. I liked this game mostly because it did distinguish the main heroines' routes fairly well, though the sub-heroines' routes tend to be really abrupt. Kuon's has two endings, one which will probably piss off a lot of fans of supernatural romance and one that is more satisfying. Kuon does have deeper motives, but she doesn't bother explaining them except in her own route. There is more explanation in the miko's route as well.
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mm... I can't say I entirely agree with your assessment... also, the review has waaaaaay too many spoilers about the setting and story. For those who like to go in not knowing the entire story, I can't recommend this review at all. It is fine to expound on the first part of the story and do some introducing of the characters, but you basically stated the entire story and its secrets. That defeats the point of a review entirely.
Edit: This is especially toxic for chuunige, where guessing about what whacked out turn of events is next and what the characters' comments mean is half the fun.
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Uwa... I don't think I've ever seen such a disastrous bit of grammatical horror...lol
That said, it made me smile anyway.
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Ah, for those who wanted to know, I decided not to play Pure X Connect, though perhaps not for the obvious reasons (that it is fairly obviously a mindless moege).
1. I hate VNs that rely on fake gimmicks (the mail system in this one)
2. I equally despise being able to name the protagonist.
3. I hate VNs that have over 10 choices (breaks story engrossment in the name of story engrossment)
4. I'm not interested in making choices during H-scenes (this is a minor annoyance, but it did kill the last bit of interest I had)
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It is probably because there are a good number of people over here that are a part of both communities. I'm not really active over there, except in private conversations, though. I mostly just skim websites for info.
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No. Generally speaking, while there are 'nukige' and 'galge' over there, the difference isn't made clear, even though it exists. For one thing, you just don't get people seriously considering why the terms were coined in the first place. As a point of reference, bishoujo-ge is an umbrella term that encompasses all male-oriented or yuri-oriented VNs. Otomege covers female-oriented VNs that expanded from shoujo manga (you can tell the influence by the male character designs, lol).
I'm pretty sure we coined chuunige and charage from the beginning, though I can't be sure. At the very least, I haven't encountered chuunige being used as widely as moege or nakige over there. Chuunige is probably the most recognizable (to anyone who has played one), but I honestly have only run across like three or four people who actually used it over there... and it was relatively recent (I'm thinking reverse-influence as a possibility, which would be funny).
'ge' is just a shortening of 'geemu', and it seems to get tacked onto just about any game-related term over there, as the usual kind of word-shortening slang that every country's 'young culture' tends to develop. I'm pretty sure I brought up chuuni games as a concept over here and someone else started calling them chuunige.
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Uguu that sounds like you hit something pretty bad. Unless a work does magic with it or only uses an archtype as a starting location, I feel the dreadful urge to vomit. If you can't find a way to fill in the early conversations with something interesting, that's ok, but charage without no character development? What do you think you are making?
I recently read Bishoujo Mangekyou -Kami ga Tsukuritamouta Shoujo-tachi-, which was, to quote myself: "poo poo poo". It had a interesting premise/setting which could have been a lot more. To put it another way, if you read it as a nukige, it's a wonderful nukige that's surprisingly strong and unyielding in it's worldview.
I played the first game in the series, the one with the vampire... and I couldn't help but feel that they wasted the entire thing. I mean, the beginning and the conclusion are excellent... but the rest is endless vampireXhuman H.
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Also, I hated the way they got rid of levitation for Oblivion and Skyrim... not being able to fly using magic was one of the huge downers. I absolutely loved flying in Morrowind (the first artifact I made was a constant-effect levitation robe), and I especially just liked exploring the world that way.
I think that Skyrim would have been a hundred times better if they had crossed out the dragons and just made it to focus on the civil war, making the siege warfare more involved and drawn out (like a good siege in bad terrain should be), with all the starvation, failed assaults on the walls, and general mayhem such events entail. Just quadrupling the size of the average fortress city would have been enough to make a huge difference, actually giving a sense of reality to the war rather than just simulating one.
The single worst habit all games of this type share other than the blandness of their stories is the lack of truly great human vs human wars... New Vegas's conflict was kind of cool, but it was over really fast... You can fight your way across the dam either way in ten minutes even if you don't know what you are doing. That's a skirmish, not a battle, lol.
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There is a good amount of ero, but most of it is joke virtual ero (heck, even the 'rl' scenes are kind of hilarious).
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Bethesda's games' real attraction is the degree to which they can be modded and individuals can transform them, but yeah, I agree with you about how pathetic Bethesda's writing is in general. I didn't play Skyrim or Oblivion for the writing, I played it for walking the world as a vampire or for the fun of sneaking around shooting people with arrows from hidden locations, or...
Basically, I never really considered them rpgs, except in the penultimate pen-and-paper sense. They were crappy action games that had a lot of side-crap that was relatively fun to mess with, lol.
So far I like the Witcher 3 a great deal more than Inquisition... but that is because they screwed up the combat in Dragon age games in general by refusing to commit to a more traditional crpg format or a full action one (the fusion made me feel like I was playing an MMO sometimes, right along with the endless busywork of such games). Not to mention that the game was surprisingly ugly (character design) outside of the main cast and several of the main characters were so annoying I couldn't bring myself to care about their lives or reasons for fighting or whatever.
Fallout 4... they would have to leave the actual writing to someone else to make it workable, frankly. I grew to dislike the way no one had really actually built anything new since the apocalypse, both in New Vegas and in 3. It was like people were either hopeless barbarians, sheep, or parasitic nation-states incapable of building anything new. The goofiness of some aspects of the setting stops being amusing and chilling after the first ten hours or so, and it ends up completely destroying my engrossment in that world in general.
I guess it is because too many aspects of the setting disregard reality, such as the fact that a quarter of a millennium after the disaster there are still working mechanical parts to salvage, lol. Steel doesn't generally last that long if no one is taking care of it.
Edit: Caesar's Legion and the Californians were the two aspects that made sense in New Vegas, for obvious reasons. Without them, I would have been tempted to just drop it entirely.
Monster Musume series part 1: Why the heck is Clephas playing this?
in Clephas' VN home
A blog by Clephas in General
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Mmm.... I probably should have mentioned that these are the VNs made by Vanadis... sorry about that.