Decay

I get annoyed at there being too many sound effects between lines too, but that's almost always due to really shitty action scenes that poorly describe the action and use cheap VFX and SFX as substitutes for good action writing. One of FS/N's big strong points (or perhaps its biggest strong point) is how detailed and intense the writing is for all of the action scenes. Sound effects should enhance the writing, not replace it. 07th Expansion's games (Higurashi, Umineko, etc) are also well known for their strong sound design. I gave Koihime Musou a shot recently because I've heard some people talking about it, and it's super guilty of this. Most of the action scenes are seriously just lots of grunts followed by cheap and shitty sound and visual effects (too bad there isn't much else about that game that's any better). Dengeki Stryker is another game I played recently with rather poor action scenes that overly rely on effects, although not nearly to the same extent. And most of the rest of that game is entertaining enough, thankfully.

Question: Just how Eushully is Soukoku no Arterial? In some ways it looks like a departure for them, but I still suspect it has quite a few totally random sex scenes. Also, what would you say is the ratio of gameplay to story?

You can very easily stretch out that content to last the entire series while also doing the heroine stories at the same time. Continuity is unimportant, due to how unconnected each scene in the common route is to each other. But he's also right. With this kind of story if you want viewers to keep watching, you have to have some kind of plot development. What works in a VN doesn't necessarily work in an anime when it comes to many things, including pacing.

They will probably start going through the heroine stories early in (after a few eps) and mix in a lot of common route content as filler alongside all of the heroine specific stuff. I have pretty low hopes for this show overall. I just don't think it can really adapt well to anime, and the staff on it seems pretty weak so far. That's up to the fansubbers, really. The true test of a fansubber's worth is how they translate Makina. Thinking on it, we are so lucky Koestle is such a good TLer, because there were so many ways Grisaia could have been completely screwed up.

What really spurred my post was a part of Koisuru Otome to Shugo no Tate where there's one choice that looks as meaningless as all of the others, only changes one or two lines of dialog, and has no real significant meaning or impact in the conversation itself, but if you don't pick one specific option you're forced to receive a bad end once you reach that heroine's route. It even still lets you enter her route, it just doesn't give you the ability to dodge the bad end. It took me forever to figure out what I did wrong, I ended up having to read a guide to figure out one choice I made a long time ago prevented an option from appearing, and it made no logical sense whatsoever. Screewwww that. When a game is full of meaningless choices, it becomes too difficult to figure out which ones are important and which ones aren't, which can make things unnecessarily frustrating. IMO, it shouldn't ever be an actual challenge to reach the end of a game without gameplay.

Meaningless choices are my bane. I enjoy choices that lead to alternate scenes, or maybe meaningless choices that have elaborate and funny responses in moderation. But choices that don't mean anything and only change one or two lines of dialog are nothing but pointless fluff. That fluff can get especially aggravating when you've screwed up a choice or two and can't go down the route you wanted to, and have to figure out which of the billion choices in the game actually meant something. Every decision in the game should ideally contribute a fair amount of content and actually have an impact.

Kamidori has too much gameplay for its own good. Especially since getting materials for new items is grindy. And honestly, it's not very good gameplay either. Thankfully it wasn't too hard to cheat so I could skip the grinding, but then I was rewarded with an underwhelming and mediocre story. Kamidori, along with Sengoku Rance, are vastly overrated. Especially Sengoku Rance, its gameplay is just like a really crappy version of Koei's RTK games, and it doesn't have anything else going for it. 999/VLR had decent gameplay, but I'm not into escape the room kind of puzzles so maybe I'd like it more if I was. The best part about it is how it contributed to the story and at least attempted to add to the tension. Basically I'm saying that I've yet to find a VN with good gameplay. So as a result, I'm really skeptical of any VN that offers gameplay of any kind. I'd rather they just focus on telling a story if they're going to bother being a VN at all, and if the game designers want to make a game, they should just make a full fledged game instead.

The CG count for the First Tale alone is in the quadruple digits, but that's counting slight variations. I don't know how many are in the Latter Tale. Still, even discounting variations, it's utterly absurd how many CGs there are in Ef, I'd make the completely uneducated guess that it's the most out of any VN ever. Such high production values for almost a pure romance title. Are Minori's recent titles still like that? All I know is that I really dislike the turn they've taken with their character design. (edit: over 1700 CGs in the first tale, counting variations. That's not even half of the game!)

You can probably assume that the bombing never happened if you entered any of the other routes. You basically have to make a lot of big assumptions in order to go along with what the creators intended. Honestly, this is why I recommend people skip the side routes. Not only are they kind of short and underwhelming, but they make the game's structure convoluted. You miss out on the red herrings misleading you, but I think you'd get enough of that going straight through to the Haru route the first time.

I thought Ef was alright. But I really hated the Mizuki chapter. You know, in retrospect, I'm not sure I actually liked Ef much after all.

I believe the author said in an interview that in the side routes (and only the side routes) it is canon that Kyousuke is Maou. It's a bit unintuitive but you have to think of the routes as completely different realities, and not just different possibilities of the same reality. It's also not the only inconsistency. Yuki behaves very differently in the Mizuha route. I guess the assumption there is that since Kyohei isn't Maou in that route, he never recruited Yuki to his cause. As for the Haru thing, there are a few factors. Like nosebleed said, she was mostly out of it during the bombing. But also, at the time she first threw accusations at Kyousuke, she probably wasn't 100% sure if it was even the same Maou. Or if Kyousuke is being fully honest about his age. So yeah, just trying to be comprehensive. During her route, she admits that she stopped suspecting him a while back and was just teasing him after a while, doesn't she?

Key's games are huge, but are worth it. Well, honestly, I've only watched the Clannad anime which has somewhat better art than the VN. I've thought about going back and reading the VN but I've already seen the anime, and from all accounts while it may not be better, it's not really any worse either and is a good way to experience the story. I just have no reason to read the VN anymore. However, the Clannad art isn't so bad that it's a reason to not read it. I can understand that viewpoint if you're talking about Kanon or Air, but Clannad is acceptable. It will have to be if you want to get the upcoming vita version, because despite claims of improved graphics, the art is identical. Compare this with this. I have a feeling that by "improved graphics" they just mean "16:9 resolution". And of course to achieve that they just crop out the top and bottom of all the backgrounds. "improved"

Insem is still working on it, though. He should definitely be more clear, but my theory is that he doesn't want to announce a resumption officially because he doesn't know if he can actually finish it or not, and he also doesn't want to hand it over to anyone else because he still wants to see if he can somehow finish it himself. I don't know why he can't just come out and say this though.

If he gives a quote, it should be one that isn't a reference to the previous year in high school, but primary or middle school. I honestly think you're the one who needs to read your VNs more carefully, but we're just going in circles at this point, aren't we? I don't think it's at all possible to convince each other anymore, we've said all there is to be said. One of us is misremembering and misunderstanding major details and I'm about 90% sure it's not me.

There's still some things you haven't really explained yet. I would just say that is based on the events of Moon.

That's kind of what I assumed. They were talking about resets thousands of years ago. From partial to complete,

I don't really get aroused by h-scenes at all so really my favorite ones are the ones that are so ludicrous I end up laughing instead. Grisaia was pretty good about that. Well, it is a comedy game after all. Absolutely. They actively make the story worse, especially with the story contrivances they establish to justify them.

.... huh? I can't really say anything to that other than I think you're somehow misunderstanding something major. That's not even close to the impression I got. If that's what's really going on then I'll just pretend my version is the truth anyways because I like it better.

Of course you can always say that they are all just a lot of plot holes but that is just you saying "those things don't match with what I believed that happened so they are just mistakes made by writers" and where would that lead us. If that's still not enough proof just tell me so I can point out for you much much more.

Yes, I know what the article is about, I'm talking about the picture in the article. Even assuming that the anime will cover the entire trilogy, that's an odd choice of promo images.

The bad end in Terra makes it pretty clear, IMO. As for the other proof, again, I just kind of feel like that's an unintentional plot hole but I admit that's kind of a flimsy argument. Basically, there's a lot of evidence that contradicts what you're saying, see the previous arguments against your posts, and only one piece of evidence that supports your theory, which can be described as a plot hole. I hate writing things off as a plot hole but that's honestly the only thing I can think of.

Is that first image spoiling one of the later two games or what? (not that it would be that much of a spoiler)

We already went over this, I thought.

Well, koestle himself pretty much said that the Inganock translation was so bad that Amaterasu shouldn't have even released it because it did the game such a disservice. After he reread it in Japanese, he said his appreciation for the game went up quite a bit. I enjoyed Inganock when I read it (I haven't played sharnoth yet) but I can't speak Japanese so I can't really say anything about the TL's accuracy. ~drama~

Sucks about Meikyuu but it will still get done eventually and koestle is a man of good taste, so I'm sure whatever he's working on now is also good. I posted this a while back in the other Meikyuu thread here, I suspect that koestle is working on the Liar-Soft steampunk series with Mangagamer. It all lines up, with koestle recently making tweets about those games, Mangagamer making very strong hints that they picked those up, and saying they're working with a new translator on a franchise from a new partner, all at the same time as koestle making the announcement about making an official localization. A couple of them have already been translated by Amaterasu but apparently the translations aren't very good and there are a few games in the series that aren't translated yet.