What got you started?

[Fred the Barber]

For me it was a very gradual progression over about a decade:

- periodically watched anime, after a high school friend introduced me to Cowboy Bebop. Mostly watched popular-in-the-US shounen stuff

- Netflix put up this thing called "Angel Beats!" - looks like what I'm used to, so I try it. 

- Holy crap, I cried from an anime. I need more of this. I ask around for advice, and someone points me to Clannad.

- Clannad gets me well and truly hooked on anime in general, and romance in particular, but I still haven't figured out the VN thing. I rabidly watch anything whose source is a Key game that I can get my hands on, and I'm aware that they're originally games, but the "too weeb for me" bias keeps me from trying the games.

- I watch Little Busters!, but the season ends with a monstrous cliffhanger. I mentally struggle with myself for about a month, before I land at a 2-week vacation where I have no real plans (I just desperately needed to get away from the office). I caved, and probably spent 5 or 6 hours a day reading Little Busters!, my first and still my favorite. I fell for VNs, and seem to still be falling.

[Zalor]

I talk about this briefly in my profile description, but to give a more detailed reply; it started with my love of the Kanon 2006 anime. Around when I turned 13 I moved on from the shounen phase of my life, and started to explore other genres. Probably my 3rd or 4th anime I watched after exploring the world of non-shounen/completed anime was Kanon, and that changed my life. Kanon got me to realize that visual entertainment could be so much more than what I had previously experienced. So naturally I continued to watch (and enjoy) other completed anime titles of all sorts of genres (I stopped watching shounen all together at this point). Then randomly on YouTube one day I ran across this review of Kanon. It was then that I discovered that the Kanon anime was based off of a visual novel. I was like "Holy shit! I need to read this!". But at that point in my life I was pretty bad with computers and had no idea how get this VN. Eventually I discovered a thing called "torrents" but had no idea how to use them, so I gave up in frustration and moved on with my life.

A few months after than, I decided to look up some freeware VNs in English. I ended up getting my hands on a neat little OELVN titled Memo, and quite enjoyed it. I liked it so much, that I decided to explore what else the OELVN community had to offer (because downloading these VNs didn't require torrents, which at this point in time I still didn't know how to use). I was then deeply disappointed by the next few titles I played, and then dropped VNs altogether for a while. (Btw, to add some perspective. This was during 2010, well before Katawa Shoujo's complete release was out). Than during the winter of that year, I finally sucked it up and figured out not only how to use torrents, but also how to get one of Kanon, and how to patch a VN. I enjoyed the Kanon VN immensely and decided to explore this medium even more. (Only this time, Japanese VNs, not OELVNs since they had deeply disappointed me previously). My next VN was Yume Miru Kusuri, and holy shit did that amaze me. I read Aeka's route all in one day and was quite impressed by this medium. From there I continued to read other VNs from time to time when I found interesting ones that caught my attention.

.     

[Rose]

Friend of mine called on skype and: "Dude I'm playing a game here and I'm dating a girl with no legs who's a runner and we're having sex right now, though it's just making choices and reading".

Me: "I'm on it".

And that's how I got to read Katawa Shoujo and ended up here, sigh good times.

[CeruleanGamer]

Friend of mine called on skype and: "Dude I'm playing a game here and I'm dating a girl with no legs who's a runner and we're having sex right now, though it's just making choices and reading".

Me: "I'm on it".

And that's how I got to read Katawa Shoujo and ended up here, sigh good times.

Cool story bro. Will read again.  

[Misterroshi]

Friend of mine called on skype and: "Dude I'm playing a game here and I'm dating a girl with no legs who's a runner and we're having sex right now, though it's just making choices and reading".

Me: "I'm on it".

And that's how I got to read Katawa Shoujo and ended up here, sigh good times.

Best story i have read here.

[Clowsama]

I read the first volume of FSN and thought the story was great so investigated a little, found about VN, realized my life was empty until this moment and enjoying my fullest since.

Seriously, long, good quality stories with background, music, voice acting, H-scene and game-like choices? That's the dream, the perfect fusion between novel and games. Thank you Japan.

[Hayashi]

Senpai @ School suggested, started with Konozora, right there.

[Kanbe]

I seek cute bishoujos. That is all

[tahu157]

Mine's probably a pretty standard approach.  Started watching Anime when I was 14, quickly discovered that the vast majority of shows made in the 2000's are adaptations of manga, light novels, and occasionally something called Visual Novels.  I watched Higurashi and the Studio Deen F/SN.  Searching Wikipedia for both revealed that they were actually adaptations of VNs.

Eventually I pirated acquired the original Mangagamer Higurashi.  Got bored pretty fast, never touched it again.

Somewhere along the way I stumbled on some blog talking about Jast's Moero Downhill Night games.  I have no idea how I got there but somehow I did.  The games interested me, especially since they were described as having many sex scenes crammed into them despite their short length.  Course' I didn't know that that meant graphic sex I thought it just meant PG-13 movie sex. I was like 15 at the time.  Anyway the idea intrigued me but I never went followed up on it.

Then sometime when I was 16, and after skimming the F/SN Wikipedia page a few times here and there, I suddenly really wanted to read it.  So I went to the Bay of Pirates (I really wish I had known about Fuwa back then to avoid the stress of using Piratebay) and grabbed a copy.  Unfortunately I got really bored of F/SN after around 14 hours of reading across 2 weeks and I dropped it for a year.  Then I stumbled on Fuwanovel somehow and my interested rekindled.  However, I wanted something with a touchscreen to read on so that I could just tap the screen to get new text, so I bought a cheap Windows 8 Pro tablet to read on and moved F/SN over and read it over the course of about 3 months and I've been hooked ever since.

[Bastian77]

It really all started with animes such as Inuyasha, Gundam Seed and Naruto that got me interested in Otaku culture. My first ever visual novel was StartRain and it left a good impression but it never got me hooked on visual novels. 

It was only when I found out there was this awesome site called "Fuwanovel" with all the download links that really got me interested in visual novels. (Before, I just didn't know where to find visual novels) This was the summer of 2014 and that was when I started my spree of visual novels. 

But the funny thing is that I still have some visual novels from last year sitting in my computer that I still haven't touched.