Zalor

Hi Zalor, I'm not sure if you'll ever see this response to a post you made in 2017. I see you made a recent blog post in 2021, so maybe you are still active in this forum. Regardless, on the off chance you do see this... I just want to thank you sincerely for taking the time to make this post. I'm sure it took a few hours (probably more) of your time to write something like this up, but you really did impact the enjoyment of Subahibi for me (and so many others! Your Subahibi post alone has 18k views now).

I followed a link on reddit.com/r/visualnovels post discussions to your Subahibi post here. I had just finished the EndSky2 ending, and was doing some post-game web-reading to close out the experience. Looking up other peoples posts about their experience in the VN, see some plot interpretations, research anything I may have missed about the endings, etc.
I've read hundreds of books and quite a few VNs, but I've never done a "re-read". Your blog post convinced me to re-read Chapter0 (DTRH1), and I'm sooooo thankful I did. It's a very cathartic experience for Zakuro, after what she went through in Ch4. A lot of her dialogue in DTRH1 now makes so much more sense, and it brings me much needed closure for her character. I'm aware of the Zakuro-Kimika ending, but DTRH1 is like the happy "canonical-end-sky-ending" for Zakuro. I greatly encourage anyone whose finished all 3 endings in Subahibi to re-read DTRH1. Pay close attention to what Zakuro says to Yuki near the end of the bar-scene, after Yuki gets done playing the piano (which is another callback to ch4).

Anyways, thank you for this Zalor, and I hope your VN journeys continue :)

Sorry to hear about the health concerns you had earlier in the year. Still appreciate the help you gave me btw. For something designed to be niche, I'm reasonably proud of the (final) build I currently have of Digital Seclusion and your help improved it a lot from the first public version. Often I'm hesitant to ask for help. Not because I don't think I need it, but because I'm paranoid that nobody is willing to help me. So even though you were rather harsh at first, it touched me that you were willing to edit for me. 

Congrats, you did the whole dang history of VN's!

Key's history is a deep topic. That review of Little Busters is on point. Even before Little Busters, Clannad's After Story route was criticized by some for being too similar to YU-NO. When I watched one HBR trailer in slow motion, I could even see which character is the first to be sacrificed by Maeda... and it's the type of character he often chooses. He's actually self-aware that his ideas aren't all fresh: the story concept for Summer Pockets came from him, but he had hesitated to put it forward because he said it felt derivative of his earlier works. Still, Key wanted to use it, and SP sold well anyway. I liked SP too; a story doesn't need to be completely original to be enjoyed, and if HBR ends up anywhere near SP's level that would still put it in a league of its own among social games. Above all, Maeda still has strengths as a comedy writer and as a character writer; Kyousuke from Little Busters and Kanade from Angel Beats in particular are timeless fan favorites.
At the core, I guess VNs inherit the advantages and disadvantages of books. Most people just don't want to read books, unless there is something abnormally good there which they can't find elsewhere, or everyone around them is reading a particular book too, like Harry Potter (or Kanon, Tsukihime, Ever17). They prefer movie (or anime) adaptations of books. The English-based VN community never had a bubble, and so like you said, relatively speaking it's done well for itself in recent years, with DDLC even on Famitsu's cover the other day. But in contrast, the Japanese VN industry is expected to financially sustain a good number of companies that aren't just indies and localizers, and sales aren't what they used to be...

Apologies for a delayed reply, I forgot that Fuwanovel won't notify you of comments made on blogs. Jun Maeda (and KEY in general) is an interesting example to bring up because on the one hand his VNs continually seem to sell very well, on the other hand I think he's exhausted his inspiration. Personally I think it was somewhere around Little Busters! where inspiration was lost (and Solidbatman's review of it basically confirmed my opinion). Using Little Busters! as an example, it isn't so much that it's bad, so much as it feels mediocre coming off of it's older sisters like Clannad, Planatarian, Air, Kanon, etc. Or maybe after reading 3+ KEY VNs you begin to tire of their formula, at least I did. Yet Regardless, KEY looks like the only major VN company that is still profitable, and able to release big budget VNs with a crowd of fans waiting in anticipation. An enviable situation to be in, although on the other hand they have built their own prison in the sense that many of KEY's fans expect the KEY formula, which imo has stagnated them creatively. Most other companies however, are pretty much forced to follow trends and/or release Ero-centric VNs to stay above water. 
For me what really baffles me, is why have VNs declined in popularity? There is so much power to the medium, being able to tell stories and have visuals and audio season the writing. It's a medium that magically touched me years ago, and I anticipated that as the medium got more well known, more people would fall in love with that magic. Indeed VNs are more known about than they were 10 years ago when I first got into them, yet they are still pretty niche. I thought that the popularity of DDLC and social games like FGO might draw more people into the broader VN circle, but they didn't get as many people into the medium as I hoped.  
Regarding everything else you said, I think we see eye to eye and I'm in agreement with your views. And thanks, this exchange has been a pleasure on my part as well.  

Thanks! It's cool to hear that you found my posts interesting. Your views make sense, and I'm broadly aligned with them, except maybe in what I choose to emphasize.
I respect your cynicism toward social games, and even toward these two social games. TBF, we don't have any clear info about them yet. And my views are that VNs could improve social games, rather than the other way around, so this subject isn't immediately relevant to pure VN fans. Even then, I only put the chance of "revolution" at like... 20%? I'd say it's 60% that people look back at these games a couple years from now and say "oh yeah, that was a weird and cool design decision! too bad nobody played these games and they were shut down months later" and 20% that the producers just cut out what make these 2 games unique in beta tests to try to salvage the low-attention-span player base. So the prospect of an "intensely integrated experience" I mentioned is just a far-off possibility with that first 20% chance as a precondition.
When it comes to labors of love versus profit-oriented works, I find it hard to draw the line between them sometimes, but agree that uninspired writers produce poor works. Tribe Nine is a bit of an unknown, with the way Kodaka described their writers as having the freedom to create stories in any genre they want, yet they still take place in a very specific "extreme baseball" setting that Too Kyo came up with, so Kodaka's supervision counts for a lot... and HBR in particular feels less inspired that I'd like, but Maeda has been mostly out of inspiration for a while now anyway, and at least his humor and eloquence of prose is extremely consistent.
I agree that the medium of VNs (particularly eroge and doujinshi, but I don't want to slight CERO-regulated works) will always be suitable for works that are idiosyncratic and push the boundaries of creative expression. Especially DLsite VNs which aren't directly subject to Sofurin's behind-the-scenes regulation. Web novels (some of the Chinese and Korean ones are excellent too) and doujin RPGs are also powerful avenues for unrestrained creative expression. But due to the way VN engines fuse audiovisual elements and literature in a scaleable way, I still consider VNs the most ideally expressive medium. I'm like you in that I'd also not want to see VNs become lucrative again, if it meant that the already shrunken market for niche/inspired works disappeared completely. (I have no words for people who unironically say they think ero "holds back" VNs; with current economic forces in the industry, it's the opposite if anything. In the first place, the VN industry has enough room for both kinds; it's not a zero-sum game.) Honestly though, I don't expect that social games having better stories will directly impact the market for that, or drain much talent from the VN industry that hasn't already been drained. I know that Kodaka is someone who always seeks new challenges for himself, and Tribe Nine is just another one of them. In the end, I'm just guessing though.
It's not so much about bigger being better for script size, as the bigger the script size, the less likely they've constrained themselves by social game standards. Even early FGO's story, before Nasu reformed it, consisted mostly of 30-second ADV segments separated by dialogue-less battles. Later on, FGO (and other story-oriented social games) ditched this "constant battles" requirement, and had more consecutive ADV segments. That's what made early arcs of FGO expand from around 2K lines for the entire arc, to several times that. Even then, something like Babylonia is still just 7K lines for a plot that deserves much more than that and feels awkward when adapted into a 2-cour anime, so there is still a gap before it in any way resembles a VN story-wise. So yeah, when I heard that Tribe Nine's script size would be so huge before it's even launched, and in the absence of indications that they'll have multiple monthly events, I just hope that this means each event or main story arc within the game is slowed down to a literary pace that's at least comparable to Danganronpa. But the proof is in the pudding, so I'll be playing these games myself to find out.
Again, it's fantastic to have such thoughtful feedback on this post; I absolutely appreciate it. Oh, and you didn't particularly come off as a curmudgeon to me.

I appreciate the lengthy post, as well the the other one you linked to. They were interesting reads, and more than anything it's always nice to see people that take an active interest in the future of visual novels. That said, I don't see social games as offering any kind of salvation to the limbo VNs have found themselves in. And it has little to do with the people making them, but rather what they are at their essence. They exist for only one reason, to suck away as much money from players as possible and to get you addicted. It's very much money first, art second. And while this is the general rule for all artistic mediums, the individual works of art that stand out as great, often are lead by those insane people who are motivated by the opposite, art first and money second.  
Now this is where my point of view radically deviates from most, so I don't expect many to agree with me. What interests me about VNs, is the artistic medium itself. What can be done with it, and how it can express themes, stories, and philosophies uniquely from other mediums. In that sense, even if VNs became massively popular. If the only things we are getting are commercial titles that appeal to the lowest common denominator (like typical Hollywood movies), I really don't care for the medium to succeed. Often when an industry is relatively new and going through it's boom period, people are more willing to fund experimental works; which is where the creative and imo interesting stuff comes from. And perhaps it's my own biases of what I've seen social games as up to this point, but I have a really hard time picturing anything deep and interesting coming out of a genre that is just glorified gambling.
One of your key arguments is that these upcoming social games will have massive scripts. That's great for people who are addicted, but that is no guarantee of quality for people with critical eyes. "Bigger is not always better", and "quality over quantity" exist as phrases for a reason. 
Regardless, this is just my two cents. And I'm what is known as a bit of a curmudgeon. And despite my cynicism, I really meant what I said in the beginning. Above all else, it's nice to see that there are people who still care about the future of VNs. So long as there are people who still care, the medium still has life in it.   

I appreciate the lengthy post, as well the the other one you linked to. They were interesting reads, and more than anything it's always nice to see people that take an active interest in the future of visual novels. That said, I don't see social games as offering any kind of salvation to the limbo VNs have found themselves in. And it has little to do with the people making them, but rather what they are at their essence. They exist for only one reason, to suck away as much money from players as possible and to get you addicted. It's very much money first, art second. And while this is the general rule for all artistic mediums, the individual works of art that stand out as great, often are lead by those insane people who are motivated by the opposite, art first and money second.  
Now this is where my point of view radically deviates from most, so I don't expect many to agree with me. What interests me about VNs, is the artistic medium itself. What can be done with it, and how it can express themes, stories, and philosophies uniquely from other mediums. In that sense, even if VNs became massively popular. If the only things we are getting are commercial titles that appeal to the lowest common denominator (like typical Hollywood movies), I really don't care for the medium to succeed. Often when an industry is relatively new and going through it's boom period, people are more willing to fund experimental works; which is where the creative and imo interesting stuff comes from. And perhaps it's my own biases of what I've seen social games as up to this point, but I have a really hard time picturing anything deep and interesting coming out of a genre that is just glorified gambling.
One of your key arguments is that these upcoming social games will have massive scripts. That's great for people who are addicted, but that is no guarantee of quality for people with critical eyes. "Bigger is not always better", and "quality over quantity" exist as phrases for a reason. 
Regardless, this is just my two cents. And I'm what is known as a bit of a curmudgeon. And despite my cynicism, I really meant what I said in the beginning. Above all else, it's nice to see that there are people who still care about the future of VNs. So long as there are people who still care, the medium still has life in it.   

I don't know if I would go as far as the anon in my praise of Umineko. I agree with the general sentiment that Umineko has a narrative complex enough to hold up even when compared to some of the best pieces of literature though. I heavily disagree with his point about using the original sprites though.
If I interpret Umineko's message somewhat correctly this approach qualifies just as much as reading "with love" as my attempts at decoding its symbolism does, because you're acknowledging the work and passion Ryukishi07 put into coming up with so many elaborate murder mysteries.  I feel a bit unhappy with the way I framed my argument around the terms "right" and "wrong" and how I used them in the context of Umineko because it comes across as if I'm trying to scold people for enjoying the mystery aspect of the VN, so I edited the paragraph after the Steins;Gate example to explain more precisely what I'm trying to get at. I hope the new version makes this clearer. I also put the "wrong" in the title in quotation marks.

Unironically this is why I've often described Suba Hibi and after reading Umineko, Umineko as well as the VN equivalent of literary works like Infinite Jest and Ulysses. Not because the themes or writing styles have anything in common with those books, but because all of them are works that are long and demand you think about them after you finish reading them. They play around with your expectations, but reward you for patience (as well as severely test your patience). I saw it said best on a thread on 4chan a while back, and I'll attach my screenshot of what that Anon said:
 

Yours was the most comprehensive and well cataloged EVN blog. You did really good work. And regardless of whether you just take a much needed and well deserved break, or end up retiring from this kind of thing. You have a strong library of reviews as a legacy!  
Slightly disappointed I didn't manage to release my VN in time to request a review from you. I hope I can at least convince you to read it once your burn out cools down. I'm not presumptuous enough to say you'll like it, but I can confidently assure you it's quite different from most VNs you've read.  

If you look at any list that recommends the "best" then the same titles will naturally appear there, because they're the more popular ones, the ones more people like.
If you are looking to find visual novels you do not know about, you will need to venture into recommendation threads with veterans asking about them, or, better still, make one yourself, because I assure you there are people who will know of Visual Novels you may not. You just need to show what you've played or what you like.
Discussion itself mostly takes place about either the big famous titles or the bigger recently released things, so you won't find obscure VNs by reading the discussions that are had, most of the time. So in that sense I can agree (though if you start threads about obscure titles it is likely that people who've played it before will at least browse it).
Do you know about Symphonic Rain? Play that without looking it up any further if it looks like it might interest you (and you haven't already).

With Bernkastel's name it makes total sense for her to like alcohol (since she shares her name with a small German town mostly known for its wine), although I don't really know yet how it would fit into an overarching booze=fantasy motif since she's the antagonist to the pro-fantasy faction. Maybe there's more of a general drinks motif going on. There's also the thing with the tea Rosa bought for Kumasawa I had totally forgotten about and I don't remember what that was all about. I don't know, I should probably stick to reading and making notes for now before I make theories based on stuff I only half-remember.

Story-wise, the original Nier is an excellent game.  While the gameplay suffers from the usual issues with camera angles that were endemic to most of the ps2 and ps3 era action-jrpgs, it was more than solid enough for a solo title more focused on plot than gameplay.  
Despite the somewhat iffy nature of English dubs, I found Nier's cast to be superlative.  The titular protagonist, Nier was a man with a very clear-cut motive and a powerful driving personality that was constantly razor-focused on his daughter's well-being and, later, that of his friends and companions.
Kaine, the game's sole heroine, is a foul-mouthed girl possessed by an insane serial-killer Shadow.  Throughout much of the game, her role is to kick characters' butts when they start to brood, but, depending on the ending you get, her role changes drastically.  Like many such characters with dark personalities and foul mouths in jrpgs, she has a heart of gold (though it is really, really hidden outside of specific moments).
Emil, the sole character seen in both Nier games, is a young man in the original game, suffering from blindness and from numerous other issues.  He is the most innocent of the characters, with the possible exception of the oft-missing Yona, serving as a strong contrast to the somewhat antagonistic relationship between Nier, Grimoire Weiss, and Kaine.
 

Glad to see that the Umineko discussion thread inspired relooking at the VN. @Mr Poltroon's post in the thread was great to read through, and likewise its interesting to relook at the opening scene. Personally when I first read the opening scene, I remember wondering why it started this way. Looking back at it in retrospect it makes more sense though. Especially once you have a greater understanding and context of who Kinzo really is, and his role in the rest of the story.
I'm interested in the observation in whether alcohol holds any consistent motif or not. Off the top of my head I know that Bernkastel is quite fond of good alcohol and so is Beatrice. In fact there are some pretty great scenes of Beatrice getting drunk. But I don't know if that's relevant to your curiosity around the use of alcohol. 
 

Nice blog post! And for what it's worth, I've grown somewhat more tolerant of ellipses over the years. Have they worn me down? ...Maybe.
I suppose the key is using them with intentionality, and not as a typographical shrug that takes the place of finishing a thought or properly punctuating a sentence. To your point, it's hard for an ellipsis to do the important work of demarcating time when those same three dots are also being employed in a dozen other pointless odd-jobs throughout the text.

This was in very belated indirect response to him actually lol. His arguments in that post has been in the back of my head for a while, and recently I ran into it again by accident. Which prompted me to write this. So yeah you're right on the money! 

In terms of books I sampled (read the first ten chapters at least) the number balloons to 300 or so... the seventy I'm talking about are the ones I was finding the most interesting.  Here is a list of the ones I enjoyed the most (even if some were trashy).
The Chaos Seeds (think an isekai/other world story with a protagonist who constantly swings back and forth between enlightened self-interest, pragmatism, and lust for power/stat geeking).
The Stork Tower (extremely interesting dystopian future with a genius street rat who makes powerful enemies in the virtual and real worlds)
Light Online (protagonist starts out as an out-of-luck NEET who is about to be turned into a virtual slave and then manages to rise high by playing a VRMMO in an unusual style).
The Ten Realms - Protagonists are an amputee mercenary named Erik and his comrade and best friend Rugrat.  They end up in the Ten Realms, two soldiers in a land of magic, and they quickly realize the only way to be themselves is to gain power and challenge themselves.  Sort of a blend of Wuxia cultivation, military fantasy, and craft obsessive nation-building with two foul-mouthed soldiers with hidden depths leading the way.
The Dark Elf Chronicles- In a future where a 'zombie particle' has contaminated most of the lifeforms on Earth, a few survivors try to live long enough to find a way to copy themselves into an online game while also stabilizing said game so it won't be a pure hellworld when they do so.  Tons of ups and downs in this story.
The Shadow Sun series- In this one, a mysterious System essentially unleashes massive numbers of super-powered monsters to cull humanity in preparation for aliens bidding on the land and resources.  Very much a survival apocalypse story for the first three books.  
The Silver Fox & the Western Hero - Pure Wuxia with hardcore cultivation and horrid levels of racial prejudice... and a young former American plopped down in the middle who has a stat sheet in his head.  The protagonist seems fairly normal, until he isn't.  He is intelligent to the point of being brilliant, and absolutely devoted to the path he chooses.  However, he is also capable of rising above his own desires at key points.  Honestly, I can't wait until the next one comes out.
Battleborne-  First in a new series about a soldier who dies with his unit and gets reincarnated as a combination of several races by a Valkyrie as reward for his life of war and bravery.
All Trades- A former conman goes into a virtual reality game to earn the money to give back to the family that supported him after his term in prison.  He really has turned a new leaf, but he quickly finds himself riding the figurative tiger by the tail as he tries to do right by those around him while also earning enough money to pay off his loan shark.

Elipsis shows a pregnant pause, it can show long hesitation, skeptism, disbelief, a flatlined joke. If used with an third party in a conversation, "..." in combination with a character sprite emphasizes the fact that they are silently observing. Often this means they saw an important but unpleasant detail.  "...!" shows surprise, positive or negative.
I really liked the use of non-dialogue in the work Mahou Shoujo. The text is almost completely dialogue, and so elipsis do a lot of heavy lifting. Also particular to that work is that the conversation beats are very pronounced.
Anyways, elipsis are concise, expressive, and can open new avenues to express dialogue beats. They do work a lot better with a character sprite though.
 
 

Good question, and I would say the difference is in a subtle but significant effect. A comma is a pause represented by a single punctuation point. And it represents a complete, temporary pause. An ellipse on the other hand, at least to me, illicits a feeling of hesitation or tapering off. This is because instead of stopping suddenly, an elipse extends itself, its composed of multiple periods. For instance a comma is like turning a switch off, then on again. And an ellipse is like stopping a car, and then starting it again. It doesn't stop instantly but takes a couple of seconds to fight the momentum. And then you have to start it up again. Therefore there is something certain and almost forceful about a comma, but indecisive or vague about an ellipse. So if you want to convey an ambiguous pause, I feel like an ellipse is better suited. 
I suppose a specific example would be like this. If I wrote "hmm...", at least in my head I would continue pronouncing the lingering "mm" sound. To the point that if I wanted to technically convey how I pronounce "hmm..." without the ellipse, I would have to spell it it as "hmmmmmm". The ellipse is like hitting the break button, I don't pause immediately. But if I read "hmm," I literally stop my pronunciation after the second "m". Like a binary system of on and off, once I see that comma I fully stop, pause, and then continue. 
This is how I distinguish the two, but I could just be weird lol 

Hearing all these comments and posts made on this game in 2019-2020 makes me glad I'm not the only one who recently got into this game, having just heard about Sayooshi last week.
Anyways I think many of your points are valid. I agree wholeheartedly that the H-scenes are over-the-top and were most likely added for shock value. It gets to the point where a good number of these scenes become drivel, almost filler to pad the game. However I would disagree they are completely meaningless given they are strongly reflective of the protagonist's deteriorating mental state and do bear some significance when the big reveal happens at the end.
That said, I do feel the drivel and disturbing content is worth sitting through (or in some cases grinding through) to get to the game's real treasure: its twist ending. A twist ending that, while not completely original, does bear its narrative fruit that makes you go "ah ha, why didn't I see that coming"? For myself, after finding out the twist in the end I was left somewhat dumbfounded I didn't figure it out sooner, but the fact the game played everything up until that point so convincingly caused me to forgive myself for not putting two and two together beforehand.
Which brings me to my next point, and that is the topic of mental health. I will say I do not think this game portrays mental health symptoms such as psychosis with much grace and makes several faults with portraying the symptoms accurately (I say this as someone who has studied psychology and sociology) but I think this is reflective largely of Japanese media as a whole. Even today, there are not a lot of anime, manga or video games I would say portray individuals with mental health symptoms very favorably or humanely and this may be reflective of the current stigmatization of mental health as a whole in Japan.
Still, in spite of underlying stigma and its emphasis on shock value over accuracy, I will say the writers of this game succeeded in making me feel sorry for the protagonist. There was not much to be gathered from his backstory unfortunately, but from the little we can glean, it is clear to me he was subject to complex trauma, loss and failure. The game may very well serve as a robust form of social commentary towards Japanese society as a whole- a culture that does not forgive ones who fail to deal with mental health symptoms on their own and especially does not forgive those who fail to fit into the system. I wish I could elaborate on this point further with examples, but that would give away too many spoilers of the ending.
Anyways, before I ramble further, will I agree Sayooshi is not a perfect game? Absolutely. However I found this game to be quite a refreshing take on the visual novel genre, especially since it touches on taboo topics of mental health and failure to conform to social norms. Yes, these themes could have been addressed in a much more sanitized manner and it is a shame that the game's perverse aspects have detracted so many potential commentators. Still, for what its worth, the fact that the game has maintained its cult following even to this day shows to me that it has achieved some merit in its story-telling.

That's why we read VNs 

I wrote about it a lot in the past, but definitely, EVNs have a much wider range of approaches to LGBT issues and tons of yuri EVNs are actually made by minority creators. Of course, sometimes you have a lesbian creator making fluffy GxG porn because they enjoy that stuff, but generally, you'll have a lot more games implementing a semi-realistic approach and trying to build a believable dynamic for the GxG romance. Even something like Love Ribbon, which might look super-fetishistic at first glance (sister incest), has some very interesting scenes of one of the sisters discovering her sexuality and trying to make sense of it. It feels way more authentic than how Japanese writers usually do it (if they even bother to touch the topic), and that's at least to some extent because Razzart, the author of that game, actually knows what she's writing about. :>
To be fair, this game's writer is a guy, but did a very good job here – and that is despite using a cliched "all-girls school when everyone is assumed to be a lesbian" setting for the first game... In a way, this series is a really cool example of Western influences and influences of otaku media clashing and melding into this weird amalgamation of themes that do not always agree with each other, particularly in Academy, where the fluffy romance formula did not synergize with the horror plot at all. Maybe playing just the sequel is the way to go after all... '^^
Edit: And only now I realized how sad it is that games conditioned me to consider "main plot" and "romance" as separate entities and be genuinely surprised when the two are connected in a truly meaningful way. Video games suck.

That sound quite interesting. I maybe wrong since I am completely ignorant about Yuri VNs, but I always felt like yuri JVNs were pretty much just fetishization. It seems that EVNs have a stronger tendency to show the more realistic nuances of homosexual relationships. 
 Also, and this is just a side note. Eldritch University is a really good title name.  

Although this is about Nothing & Nowhere you've ended up convincing me to read Lynne!  To be honest I haven't heard of it before, but I'm a sucker for good psychological horror, and I actually really like the artistic design of it based off of the vndb sample photos.