Underrated Visual Novels

[Clephas]

Looking at things from the Japanese side... I'd probably say that Bloody Rondo, by 3rdEye, didn't get a fair break.  While the game isn't really chuuni crack, it definitely manages to be chuuni marijuana.  Also, the werewolf servant's path is just... cute (mostly because of the unconventional way it ends).

[Chronopolis]

While the game isn't really chuuni crack, it definitely manages to be chuuni marijuana.

Gwahahaha I lol'd.

 

I don't know...most of the games I play I haven't found much discussion about at all, so underrated/overrated isn't even a thing. I did see that Houkago no Futekikakusha got low scores on EGS(60), which seemed somewhat lower than vndb (even accounting for differences in site averages). It's an easy game to get ticked off at or be let down by, not least of which being the slightly muddled plot device usage and lack of explanation of the setting, but I think it remained powerful in emphasizing the emotional states, thought processes, and relationship of the characters, from the start to mostly the end.

[Clephas]

Gwahahaha I lol'd.

 

I don't know...most of the games I play I haven't found much discussion about at all, so underrated/overrated isn't even a thing. I did see that Houkago no Futekikakusha got low scores on EGS(60), which seemed somewhat lower than vndb (even accounting for differences in site averages). It's an easy game to get ticked off at or be let down by, not least of which being the slightly muddled plot device usage and lack of explanation of the setting, but I think it remained powerful in emphasizing the emotional states, thought processes, and relationship of the characters, from the start to mostly the end.

Depending on how you look at it, the over-focus on the characters' mental states and emotions can be a good thing or a bad thing.  I do think that, regardless of focus, the utter lack of a serious explanation for the motivations of the background antagonists of the story (not the ones shown) and the more... unusual aspects of the setting was incredibly irritating.  I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the game (I did, as you can see in my posts on it in my VN of the Month Thread) I'm simply saying that from a literary perspective, it was harmed by that lack of detail, since it was definitely a serious story (which always requires more detail).

[Chronopolis]

Depending on how you look at it, the over-focus on the characters' mental states and emotions can be a good thing or a bad thing.  I do think that, regardless of focus, the utter lack of a serious explanation for the motivations of the background antagonists of the story (not the ones shown) and the more... unusual aspects of the setting was incredibly irritating.  I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the game (I did, as you can see in my posts on it in my VN of the Month Thread) I'm simply saying that from a literary perspective, it was harmed by that lack of detail, since it was definitely a serious story (which always requires more detail).

Yeah, pretty much. Just because not having an explanation incidentally led to

the MC (and possibly reader) not having more than a single target for his seething hate

and a lack of an expositional side against the emotional one, doesn't mean that an explanation totally should have been there.

[Tenkuru]

Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria is not really underrated, but more on the "never heard of that" side. Even though it has very high ratings on many of the LN / manga sites I visited, with mostly 9s and 10s. Heck, it's even the top 2 manga over at MAL and the number 1 LN. It doesn't help that LNs aren't very popular and the people who read LNs generally read those that already have an anime adaptation. Well, I hope that is does get into the spotlight the future as it's really a masterpiece, with it being the greatest work of fiction I've ever seen. 

[Bolverk]

Loads of untranslated ones goes without saying.

 

Draculius imo is underrated. It's really good, albeit from a obscure company I suppose.

[crunchytaco]

Loads of untranslated ones goes without saying.

 

Draculius imo is underrated. It's really good, albeit from a obscure company I suppose.

 

It goes without saying that if they're untranslated, they can't be appreciated by the non-native speaking majority. That alone makes most of them underrated. That's why I'm learning. 

[Funyarinpa]

Zero Escape series is not really "underrated" (Gamestop's 2012 Handheld GOTY is Virtue's Last Reward) but more like "under-appreciated". I think it should have selled more. (Ironically, it actually bombed in Japan, not the West.)

[fun2novel]

SINCLIENT

Snow Sakura

12Riven

Soul Link (Ultimate)

Scarlett

Edelweiss

Baka Moe

Chuning Lover

Eve New Generation X

Ore no Tsure wa Hito de nashi

 

all don't get the love they deserve, lol.

[SanadaShadow]

...Why does everyone always ignore Utawarerumono? It is the absolute best of the Leaf games, and I'm sure at least some of you know that Leaf doesn't fuck around... although their characters are all little whores.

[Mephisto]

Because Utawarerumono was bad. At least the pc translated version. 

 

Maybe should play it in japanese before giving a final judgement though. It just wasn't very appealing and didn't match up to eien no aselia at all except in a few choice portions that were well down. ( the shitty way scenes worked sucked too) 

[SanadaShadow]

WHAT. Utawarerumono was great! It was one of my top ten VNs! Granted, I never saw the English translated version, and the sex was boring as usual in VNs, but the game itself was so beautiful, so vibrant, so poetic. I felt for Hakuoro as he reached his end, chills went down my spine with the Ice-Man revelation and I was genuinely both gratified and saddened at the end.

[cryofrzd]

...Why does everyone always ignore Utawarerumono? It is the absolute best of the Leaf games, and I'm sure at least some of you know that Leaf doesn't fuck around... although their characters are all little whores.

 

You're really saying Utawarerumono is the best out of leaf's VNs   How many more of them have you read? Tears to Tiara?

 

They have written To Heart 1, 2 + White Album 1 and 2.

And if you like more weird niche ones Shizuku, Kizuato and Tenshi no inai 12-gatsu.

[Toranth]

You're really saying Utawarerumono is the best out of leaf's VNs   How many more of them have you read? Tears to Tiara?

 

They have written To Heart, White Album 1 and 2.

And if you like more weird niche ones Shizuku, Kizuato and Tenshi no inai 12-gatsu.

I've read all of Leaf's main games (I usually avoid fandisks) except Shizuku, Kizuato, and White Album 2. Of those, I agree that Utaware is the best.

TtT is very similar, but suffers from much worse writing and characterization for most of the game. It's got some excellent sections, but overall is meh.

To Heart is classic, but if it were released today it would be just another game full of clichés and tropes. Just because it started many of them doesn't excuse the fact that the game is rather simple.

Many of their recent products, especially Full Ani and Megiddo, were just not good. Leaf is still a decent studio, and anything they make is worth taking a look at. But their reputation, like Key's, is primarily riding on their excellent works from 10 years ago.

[SanadaShadow]

I don't like TtT because it relies too heavily on time. And while that may be more strategically exhilerating, I personally find it exhaustiong and bland. I've played all of the abovementioned games, I am a huge Leaf fan, but I can say that Utawarerumono is the absolute best. You can sit there and judge me, say what you want to, but it doesn't make you right.

[Zalor]

Translated VNs generally get better ratings than they deserve, because of the principle that hunger is the best spice. 

 

I can't speak for the higher quality of untranslated VNs since I can't read Japanese (yet), but I have noticed that translated VNs get way better ratings then I think they deserve. I played VNs that are rated 7/10 and 8/10 and they honestly were not that good. I've adjusted my trust of the ratings for VNs where anything that is lower then 8.5/10 I tend to avoid. I don't like inflating my standards, but I'm more of a quality over quantity guy.   

[Down]

I can't speak for the higher quality of untranslated VNs since I can't read Japanese (yet), but I have noticed that translated VNs get way better ratings then I think they deserve. I played VNs that are rated 7/10 and 8/10 and they honestly were not that good. I've adjusted my trust of the ratings for VNs where anything that is lower then 8.5/10 I tend to avoid. I don't like inflating my standards, but I'm more of a quality over quantity guy.   

It's true for everything. In anime, what we could call "entrylevel" anime (without any pejorative connotation) always get overrated.

It just happens that entrylevel VNs equals translated VNs for the most part, and for obvious reasons.

[fun2novel]

Tears to Tiara was a good game but the story cut short too soon. It had a wonderful presentation too. But the story, couldn't they invested a little more into it instead of all these h-scenes????

 

I was so disappointed by (the story in) Tears to Tiara that I got turned off from trying Utawarerumono for good. People keep saying how good it is so I don't know, maybe I should play it.

[SanadaShadow]

Utawarerumono is good. Everything it does blends into the story well. Even the H-scenes, I hazard to say.

Also, if you autocorrect Utawarerumono, you get "mouthwatering". Or at least I did.

 

TtT starts off great, but the gameplay is too dependent on time, which is major bad in games if I'm playing.

[Clephas]

Utwarerumono's battle system is not a good one.  It is a basic srpg system, without the benefit of being able to grind between battles to get underleveled characters to where you want them.  Considering the heavy focus on story in a VN/srpg, they would have been much better off just giving everyone the same amount of exp every battle, rather than focusing it on those who did the damage and killed the enemies.  That would have allowed you to keep a full party of characters without adding in the need to grind.

 

TtT's battle system is basically a partial and half-assed rip-off of the Growlanser series, without the benefit of letting you alter the course of the game through how you act/win your battles.  As such, I mostly saw the game's faults when I played it. 

 

Leaf's penchant for stealing battle systems imperfectly is easily its worst habit, and I honestly think its games are overrated, not underrated.

[Decay]

With Utwarerumono, I'm waiting on the translation of the PSP version, which has a much improved battle system. 

 

Honestly, I think most VNs are overrated, not underrated. I can think of a lot that I've played and thought "really, people were raving over this?" but not really of many that I've liked more than the consensus. I mean, I guess technically I rated Steins;Gate on VNDB higher than its average, but I'm not about to say "It only has a 9??"

 

There's also perhaps the fact that I haven't played enough to find any hidden gems or underrated games, since I'm restricted to english language games. Thinking back, maybe the closest one I can think of that might be underappreciated (probably not underrated), is Suika. It's not a game you see mentioned anywhere. Its average score on VNDB is pitifully under 7 (making it the 756th top rated game). It's actually a pretty interesting VN. Sure, there are definitely some (or many?) bad points to it. Bad art, it received a pretty bad translation from MangaGamer, some of the stories weren't very good, and it also had a structure that's unusual for translated VNs (it's linear series of separate short stories). But it's perhaps noteworthy for its approach to death, which deviates from the norm in VNs. Suika is all about death. But unlike most VNs, it's not about avoiding it at all costs or going against fate. It's about embracing and seeing the beauty in death. Each story expresses this in a different way, some worse than others, but the message it tries to tell struck me as being very different from what you usually see. This probably led me to believe it was a better VN than it really was, and I've since lowered my evaluation on it now that I've had time to think about it, but I think it should perhaps get at least slightly more notice than it currently does. I think it would have been better with a more traditional structure and a focus around the story with the painters, since that was the best one.

[crunchytaco]

I can't speak for the higher quality of untranslated VNs since I can't read Japanese (yet), but I have noticed that translated VNs get way better ratings then I think they deserve. I played VNs that are rated 7/10 and 8/10 and they honestly were not that good. I've adjusted my trust of the ratings for VNs where anything that is lower then 8.5/10 I tend to avoid. I don't like inflating my standards, but I'm more of a quality over quantity guy.   

 

Yeah, I wonder if the population who play a lot of untranlsated VN generally look at the list of VNDB and think, "WTF?!" 

 

I'll stick to what I know though and adjust as my VN knowledge increases. I've been giving a lot of 7-8 VN's a chance lately. Some of them are not so bad, but most of them are (in my taste) not very interesting. 

[Clephas]

I cherry-picked VNs at first... but then I started just playing anything that looked even vaguely interesting.  After a while, it gets hard to remember most of them.  Moege especially tend to run into one another, since so many are carbon copies of earlier games with minor twists.  To be blunt, I've read most of the best and tons of medium-quality (I got really good at screening VNs, really fast) VNs... but out of the four hundred or so I've played, maybe forty to fifty are truly worth being hyped, whereas the rest are usually... not so.  I sometimes go back to old games I played before at random (like I did with Inpyuri) and replay them to confirm whether they were as good as I remember.   Fortunately, in most cases, I had good taste even in the beginning, lol. 

[Chronopolis]

Yeah, I wonder if the population who play a lot of untranlsated VN generally look at the list of VNDB and think, "WTF?!" 

 

I'll stick to what I know though and adjust as my VN knowledge increases. I've been giving a lot of 7-8 VN's a chance lately. Some of them are not so bad, but most of them are (in my taste) not very interesting. 

Rather than ratings, I triangulate vn's using seeing what interesting-looking tags they have. I kind If the art catches my eye I might check something out.

But I don't have intentions on picking up a generic moe'y looking title unless there are some compelling things said about it in some review. Actually that's how I accumulate most of my backlog.

[Rust]

Yeah, I wonder if the population who play a lot of untranlsated VN generally look at the list of VNDB and think, "WTF?!" 

 

I'll stick to what I know though and adjust as my VN knowledge increases. I've been giving a lot of 7-8 VN's a chance lately. Some of them are not so bad, but most of them are (in my taste) not very interesting. 

 

Yeah, VNDB ratings makes me cringe sometimes. I mean Rewrite ranked #10 there. Granted, Rewrite is a good VN but i really don't think it deserves score more than 8.  Its topped Eustia and HatsuSaku (which is my favorite) by large margin kinda annoy me .