Kenshin_sama

So yeah, this might be something of a hot take, but I don't think Demon Slayer was good at all. I don't mind it going for a simple plot, and there were some things I found interesting, but it's a major flaw when 80% of the anime's storytelling comes from internal monologues. Not only is it lazy since it requires little to no planning, but it fails to fully utilize its assets as an anime. I wouldn't mind it as much if it was kept to a minimum, but they packed so much into every episode that it severely impacted my enjoyment of the series.
There is so much information that anime is able to convey compared to something like a book, so it makes no sense for Demon Slayer to restrict itself to the degree it has been. Anime can benefit from a variety of techniques such as facial expressions, meaningful dialogue, camera zooms, sound direction, atmosphere, and various other aspects that are unique to the medium. But no, Demon Slayer decided to hamfist almost everything with monologues and poorly timed flashbacks.
It's a shame too; I really wanted to like this anime. The animation is stunning, but no matter how much you dress up garbage, it's still garbage. I probably would've enjoyed this more as a picture book than I did as an anime. Other than the animation, I have absolutely no respect for what this anime does. Hell, even that one awesome fight scene on episode 19 was bogged down by this.
4/10

Okay, I just realized it's my dark mode addon causing the issues. Thought it might've been a site issue.
I'll just switch to a theme with native dark mode and turn the addon off for this site. Thanks!

My forever love, Naruto Uzumaki

Hey, those are the brain cells that count!

I think that one of the problems with VNs is that so many of the heavily recommended VNs are very long. So many of the ones that are really often recommended and very highly rated are 50-100 hour titles and I just don't think that getting into something where those types of titles are seen as an introduction is easy.
Another thing is how so many in the community tries highlight VNs as some sort of high art superior to every other medium and completely disregard anything part of the VN market that doesn't adhere to what they consider good, like calling moege and nukige trash and trying to make it out to be as if VNs would be way more amazing and mainstream had it not been for those damn genres.
I personally think that one of the ways to get people into VNs would be to actually get people into things like moege or nukige as I think there are a lot of people who would want harem anime and manga to actually have conclusive endings and based on the amount of 18+ doujins of popular characters there is a demand for ero content with characters you actually get emotionally attatched to during a story.
I think trying to highlight VNs as having good stories won't really do much as every medium has good stories to offer, I think instead it is important to highlight the things which makes VNs special and the types of content you either won't find in other mediums or you won't find done as well. Some I would highlight is integration of porn in the story, harem stories with branching routes and romantic development as well as mystery which can be enhanced by route and choice systems.
Take nekopara for instance, in the realm of moege it was well done but nothing special, but it managed to go sort of mainstream and there seems to be quite a large base of people who are fans of it outside of the VN communities. I think some of this love people have for it comes from how it has done stuff they haven't seen before as they haven't gotten into VNs.

I personally think that VNs right now are in a sense stuck in a cursed loop. VNs as a medium just really lack variety and as a result appeal to a small number of people. Even most all-ages titles follow the same story structure: even in non-adult titles a male protagonist always has to be surrounded by a lot of female love interests; it almost always has to take place in high-school; even in plot-focused stories there are a lot of slice-of-life scenes, which aren't even well written, and mostly just serve as a way to stall the story for some time rather than developing the characters; finally, the personalities of the protagonist, the heroines and even the side characters typically just follow certain well-known archetypes. So, if you just happen not to enjoy some of these titles and just want to find something more unique, you're much better off watching some anime or reading a manga. Otome games are a bit different, but, from my limited experience with them, they seem to have a bag of different, though slightly similar, problems. There are indeed some unique and experimental VNs that do things differently, but most of these are doujin titles and don't get that much exposure. Most of them aren't even that good, since good authors are likely to join some company at some point and start making a lot more standard VNs, or leave the medium altogether. Also, we, the current VN fans, enjoy these tropes to at lest to some extend, and a lot of us actually prefer them. As a result, in a short run it's not a very good strategy for companies to experiment with story structures, since they don't know if the fans would like these changes, and they just stick to the strategy that worked thus far. And VNs are also expensive to make, so they don't allow for much flexibility. Nowadays, manga and light novel authors don't even have to make any initial investment at all, since they just can start posting their stories online and see how people react to them, or even completely stick to episodic online distribution. In case of VNs, even a single financially unsuccessful product can make a whole company go bankrupt.
I personally think that if VNs somehow let this loop, there's a good chance that they would start appeal to a bigger number of people. They probably wouldn't be the same people as the current VN fans. Will they ever do that? I doubt it, but I don't know. EVNs might actually lead to something interesting at some point, who knows?

Perhaps you can abuse your admin rights a little?

I forgot to wish a happy birthday to my friend @Tiagfvarela! Well, perhaps it's still his birthday in the timezone of Spain, the land from which he hails. Happy birthday, sir!

Happy belated, littleshogun!
And happy birthday to you, Mr. Tiag!

Hey, those are the brain cells that count!

Hey, those are the brain cells that count!

Confession: With all my love for computers, I'm apparently a complete idiot when it goes to tech.
For like a year now I was getting more and more problems with my PC's tiny (128GB) SSD, always running out of space and bottlenecking my system despite me putting all large apps on the accompanying hard drive and actively trying to keep things tidy. For the last few months I was thinking about various workarounds and only today it occurred to me that I should check out what kind of SSD it is, buy a larger one, make a system backup to an external drive and switch it out... Which will cost me like 70$ and a few hours of work max. Aren't my last two living braincells amazing?
Edit: So, the surgery was successful and the patient is stable! Quite possibly, he'll soon be better than he ever was... :3 I had to make a clean Windows install after all, but I guess that's for the better after a few years of continous use. This should make the daily use quite a bit nicer... And my life by extention, considering the coronavirus is going out of control in Poland and I'm likely to sit in this room, looking at this screen quite a lot in the coming months. 😅

 

Happy belated, littleshogun!
And happy birthday to you, Mr. Tiag!

Happy 34th birthday to our mod @Mr Poltroon and also happy belated birthday to our @Yuuko. I hope that both of you will have a good birthday.
PS - Thanks for all of the birthday messages to me yesterday. Also Yuuko here is more easier to type compared to Kiririri lol.

That was such a good ending. Really enjoyed the anime overall.
Felt like it did just about everything to resolve the main conflict in this arc and didn't leave me wanting for much. It was the kind of anime where I wouldn't mind more content, but I was happy with what I got. The characters and plot were interesting in this series, too. I'm also glad that the protagonist being overpowered made sense within the context of the plot and didn't diminish the weight of the main conflict.

Added The Misfit of Demon King Academy.

Tay's back, so all of our freedoms are gone again.

I finished playing VA-11 Hall-A recently and it was quite enjoyable. The bartending mechanics were nicely woven into the story and surprisingly challenging at times.
The protagonist, Jill, is adorable and relatable and made for an overall enjoyable experience in the game. She has these weird quirks that contrast with her serious demeanor and makes her all the more endearing. The rest of the cast also have some interesting personalities that kinda make them stand out in their own way, and it was interesting to hear about their views on society. I always made it a point to serve the right drink at the right time so I don't miss out on any good dialogue.
Oh, and Dorothy is a lot of fun :3
The ending managed to make me cry a bit. It was bittersweet, but still left me feeling hopeful for Jill. I'm very much content with how things turned out overall and how well the game managed to leave an impression on me.
 
The game may or may not need a guide depending on how observant you are, but some choices are just really difficult to get without one. That said, whenever I did find the most optimal answer, I'm always able to trace it back to subtle hints in the dialogue. If any of you go in blind for your first playthrough, I'd recommend paying extra careful attention to each client's preferences and to Jill whenever she talks about a drink's history. Thankfully the game is fairly forgiving on mistakes, so you'll be fine as long as you're not a total jerk.
 
Overall, I highly recommend it!

I finished playing VA-11 Hall-A recently and it was quite enjoyable. The bartending mechanics were nicely woven into the story and surprisingly challenging at times.
The protagonist, Jill, is adorable and relatable and made for an overall enjoyable experience in the game. She has these weird quirks that contrast with her serious demeanor and makes her all the more endearing. The rest of the cast also have some interesting personalities that kinda make them stand out in their own way, and it was interesting to hear about their views on society. I always made it a point to serve the right drink at the right time so I don't miss out on any good dialogue.
Oh, and Dorothy is a lot of fun :3
The ending managed to make me cry a bit. It was bittersweet, but still left me feeling hopeful for Jill. I'm very much content with how things turned out overall and how well the game managed to leave an impression on me.
 
The game may or may not need a guide depending on how observant you are, but some choices are just really difficult to get without one. That said, whenever I did find the most optimal answer, I'm always able to trace it back to subtle hints in the dialogue. If any of you go in blind for your first playthrough, I'd recommend paying extra careful attention to each client's preferences and to Jill whenever she talks about a drink's history. Thankfully the game is fairly forgiving on mistakes, so you'll be fine as long as you're not a total jerk.
 
Overall, I highly recommend it!

I'd be careful buying consoles at launch. Let everyone else be the beta testers.

Oh snap, that's awesome! If that pre-order sale is going after the end of October, I won't have to worry about my budget at all.
That really made my day. Thank you!

Thank you! We have some amazing fans, definitely!
 
We plan on opening the pre-order store some time after the KS ends, where you will be able to purchase the add-ons after the Kickstarter ends for a limited period of time (VBFI's pre-order store was open for a few months, but we aren't sure how long we will leave it open for VBHI)!
 
Some add-ons are time-limited though, and may be removed from the pre-order store early before it officially closes, so do keep that in mind if you are aiming for those specific add-ons! (time limited add-ons and those that aren't are both listed on the Kickstarter page)
 
However, apart from the shikishis, most if not all of the physical goods should be available for purchase from the pre-order store, so do give that a look if you are interested but do not have funds in time for the KS!

The funny thing for me is that my impression of Japanese creatives (writers, mangaka, game devs, etc) is very positive and I think they have a lot of brilliant minds working in those fields. But my impression of the Japanese consumer base lowers with every year. I think the oppressive education system makes a minority of people snap and a subset of that minority express it through art, which is why their fiction can be so good. But the majority of Japanese manage to conform to the system, and for those who conform I think it permanently damages their creative thinking abilities. It's interesting how Higurashi is the favorite Ryukishi07 work in Japan, and Umineko (which is comparatively a more experimental and imo overall a deeper work) is somewhat scorned in Japan but highly praised in the west. Maybe at my core I'm fundamentally westerncentric, but I think the west is right on this one. Umi > Higurashi. Although without a doubt both are very good.
I think Ryukishi07 was tongue and cheekly referring to his Japanese audience in these quotes: pic1, pic2