Kenshin_sama

Same my man. Kokoro has always been one of my top girls in the series

TFW I will never get my Kokoro After and Kokoro After+
Be sad for me, boyos. 

Source: https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=16408574

Source: https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=16408574

Happy birthday, @NowItsAngeTime! Hope you have a good one.

Nya

Thanks! 30 feels weird but not much different at the same time

Source: https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=16408574

This is my impression of what the state the industry is in right now (some of this is repeated from previous posts I've made here on the forums).
Just to get this out of the way, the VN industry (non-nukige) is currently in the process of contracting and changing priorities.  The industry has long relied charage/moege to keep sales up, which has ironically led to most of the writing talent fleeing to other mediums.  This wasn't really a problem until the last six years or so.  Why has it become a problem?  Because my generation in Japan has less money for spending on high school nostalgia than it did back in 2014.  At the same time, the younger generation of otakus in Japan is far less interested in standard charage (high school situations, predictable romances, etc), so this means that the industry is not set up to compensate for the demographic changes in its consumer base.
To be blunt, more and more VN consumers want something with an actual story.  Unfortunately, due to the trends of the last decade, writers who can actually produce what they want are in short supply.  As a result, the VN industry is contracting as companies find they can't replace the talent they abandoned during the charage boom as easily as they could the random ero-writers they've been using up until now. 
A few pieces of evidence (that don't involve hearsay).  The relative number of plotge to charage made in the last two years (regardless of quality) has tipped toward plotge significantly... though most of those are of lower quality than in the pre-2015 years due to the aforementioned lack of talented writers.  Navel and the other major names in particular are aggressively testing the waters, as is evidenced by their releases in the last few years (fewer FDs, more new IPs, resurrection of IPs with a differing atmosphere than previously seen, etc). 
A few hiccups:  Overcompensation... the fondness of the younger generation for the consumption of escapist material has led to a string of low-quality fantasy VNs in the last couple of years (Digination being the source of many of them).  This would normally be a good sign, but it is troubling that the new writing talent that is emerging isn't leaving much of an impression on someone who is as much of a fantasy addict as I am.  The flow of money into these 'experimental' games (lol) has diverted funds that probably would have normally been pumped into charage developing, which has caused the actual number of non-nukige VNs released to fall overall. 
A key statistic drawn from my experiences over the past decade...  Until the last two years, it was normal for 6 or more non-nukige VNs to be released each month on average.  However, increasingly we are seeing months where only three or four releases are seen... and those releases differ significantly in nature from previous years (and are even spottier in quality). 

What's up, my dude.

What's up, my dude.

Oh hey, thanks

Broski's back, y'all.
Denpasoft (full 18+ release): https://denpasoft.com/collections/newest-releases/products/9-nine-episode-2 Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033420/9nineEpisode_2/ Denpasoft (free patch for the Steam release): https://denpasoft.com/collections/dlc/products/9-nine-episode-2-18-dlc

In this exact order, I assume?

This does exist, though not translated, sadly. Seisai no Resonance is like this. You play as the new girl who just transferred into an all-girls school, and you can choose from 5 main heroines, as well as three side heroines with short extra routes. (Just a scene or two each, but still nice.) It also has really good story.
It's my favorite yuri title to date, and the only one I'm aware of that takes a standard eroge style route system, but makes it yuri.

Confession: I think I found a cure to the wake-up blues.

https://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2019/08/10/the-language-of-love/
Feel free to discuss the review/the game, if anyone is actually interested in that, but I created this mostly to celebrate the fact that we have first content on the main site since exactly one year ago (not counting VNTS). And while publishing a single article on August 10th every year would be an interesting gimmick, I kind of hope to see more life there (and not just my EVN reviews too, that would be in really bad taste). If you find in yourself some energy for writing about a recent release, I'm sure no one will scoff at even one-time contributions, if they keep a decent-enough quality. We don't have a review team leader ATM, but if you contact me or @Emi, I'm pretty sure we'll be able to figure it out.
And the blog staff recruitment post is also still up. :3

Yare yare daze