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The VN community in your country


InvertMouse

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Just wondering how strong is the VN community in everyone's countries? Here in Australia, VN may as well be completely unknown. We have plenty of anime fans, but only a tiny portion of them play any VN.

When I took a trip to Hong Kong a few years back, I was pleasantly surprised to find there were plenty of folks who read VNs, even if they struggled with the Japanese. The English translations are less helpful for them because they speak Cantonese over there. A lot of anime shop owners genuinely know and care about the content in their stores. There was even a shop dedicated to doujinshi, many of which were from Key. You'll never find anything like that here back in Australia. I found the community there to be really friendly.

Thanks!

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I actually don't know anyone in real life who likes visual novels, although I'm sure there are many out there around where I live. (California) After all, there are people on this forum from california :P. I think it makes sense that more people enjoy watching anime over reading VNs since most people also prefer movies over books.

With that said, visual novel readers will likely always be in the minority, but it's better to have a small group of good people than a large group of trolls.

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I actually don't know anyone in real life who likes visual novels, although I'm sure there are many out there around where I live. (California) After all, there are people on this forum from california :P/>. I think it makes sense that more people enjoy watching anime over reading VNs since most people also prefer movies over books.

With that said, visual novel readers will likely always be in the minority, but it's better to have a small group of good people than a large group of trolls.

I'm in cal. yep

but and there's like 1-2 more people on this forum too, but nobody I know in real life either.

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I live in Sydney, australia and i dunno any1 else who plays VNs (except maybn 1 person)

and HK they can read the chinese fan translations which is very strong. at least twice as strong as the West.

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I live in France, a huge lot of people read mangas, fair amount of anime watchers, but not too much for VNs.

There is a small net of websites about VNs, a translation team or two (english->french) and I know people on forums and IRL that occasionally play VNs. Your average random that only watch the big three doesn't even know it exists, but people that are actually into animes are easy to convince, whether it's through Type-Moon or other VNs.

Overall people around me are rather receptive to VNs which is a thing.

I think considering the overall popularity of VNs outside of Japan it's not bad. Probably behind USA and asians neighboorhood of Japan but better than the rest of Europe.

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Thanks to my Meetup and Facebook groups, I've gotten to know a few VN fans in real life here in Chicagoland. One individual was waiting for the School Days translation to be finished, and another person liked both 999 and RE:Alistair. And after attending a few fan conventions, I have met a few other fans. There's the people who were also shopping at the Hendane booth at the first possible chance on Friday morning, others who were with me at the Shira Oka booth / panel, and a few who found an indie group's little-advertised ACen 2012 discussion. (I wish I could remember the group's name, or their work in progress...)

I live in France, a huge lot of people read mangas, fair amount of anime watchers, but not too much for VNs.

I don't want to get off-topic, but I heard not long ago that the French manga translation scene is impressive. I got a slight glimpse of it while in a Canadian bookstore, and seeing complete series that had only partial English translations, or that were never licensed.

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I don't want to get off-topic, but I heard not long ago that the French manga translation scene is impressive. I got a slight glimpse of it while in a Canadian bookstore, and seeing complete series that had only partial English translations, or that were never licensed.

It's getting more and more popular; France is actually the second market for mangas after Japan. Manga editors and japan-oriented conventions are popping up everywhere, and both libraries and big stores now have a fair amount of mangas selling.

Still have issues like series getting licensed and the publication never finishes, but yeah, a lot of the hits in Japan get exported here so it's pretty nice.

Compared to that the animation market doesn't fare very well though...

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We have a university anime club where I live in the US. From what I've gathered, there's a decent number of people that play VNs, but not many that admit to playing VNs. A good strategy to uncover this silent minority is to throw VN references (code-speak) into casual conversation. Those in the know will understand and will migrate into the conversation, while those that don't will simply ignore the references.

I post on the NISA forums occasionally using this method. I'm sometimes surprised how many people take the "bait". I also have a real-life friend that I've not only introduced to VNs, but have lured into machine translated Japanese VNs.

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Wow, there are a lot more fellow Californians here than I thought.

ThatPlayer is also in California lol. (fucking crazy sleep schedule though)

I have friends that are into anime & manga but have no idea what a visual novel is. Though not all of them like anime and manga and some of them even refer to it as "just well-drawn porn." =_=

enlighten them :DDDDD lul

"Though not all of them like anime and manga and some of them even refer to it as "just well-drawn porn." =_="

referring anime/manga as well drawn porn? they must have watched too much ecchi type shows instead of badass good shows

if they're referring to vn's as such, then they may be thinking of only the nukige x.x

"I have friends that are into anime & manga but have no idea what a visual novel is. "

do they at least know that Clannad/FSN/etc are VN adaptations?

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I live in France and yes the VN community is quite small, but in the last two years the number of VN translation project has doubled and we're tryiing to get a small community here but it is difficult. (http://esprit-vn.fr/)

The fact is i know quite a few people who play VN because they were the ones who talked about them in the first place and who dragged me into their association (Kawa-Soft) wich officially translates VN. But as said above the manga/anime community here in France is so large, with some communication skills and more projects we might be able to create a bigger community around it.

It's also one of the reasons i'm helping them and translating myself Rewrite into french :)

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I live in France and yes the VN community is quite small, but in the last two years the number of VN translation project has doubled and we're tryiing to get a small community here but it is difficult. (http://esprit-vn.fr/)

The fact is i know quite a few people who play VN because they were the ones who talked about them in the first place and who dragged me into their association (Kawa-Soft) wich officially translates VN. But as said above the manga/anime community here in France is so large, with some communication skills and more projects we might be able to create a bigger community around it.

It's also one of the reasons i'm helping them and translating myself Rewrite into french :)/>

Aw, you just reminded me I joined Kawa-Soft 2 months ago already but totally forgot because I've been busy lately. Once i'm done with my exams i'll have to think about registering on esprit-vn and try to show up to actually start doing something.

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The VN community here in Brazil is a complete mystery to me. As far as I know, me and several of my friends ARE the community (lol). But seriously, I'd say 9, maybe 10 people I know (including myself) play VN and admit it, but who knows, there are a couple anime conventions in my state alone and quite a few in the others too. Just maybe, a small percentual of people who attend these conventions plays them and, from my perspective, that means it's a "growing market" as there is no real reason one stops playing or, at least, starts to hate the whole thing. So if I had to guess, I'd say it is expanding, although slowly.

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I also live in Brazil, and it's pretty much what Sieg said. The anime/manga scene is pretty big, with quite a few conventions and stuff, but when it comes to VNs I know like a handful of people that also read them (and none of them in real life). That it's like this everywhere just goes to show how young VNs still are as a medium, I guess.

I did find this blog the other day though, and it's pretty good from what little I've seen of it.

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I did find this blog the other day though, and it's pretty good from what little I've seen of it.

Yeah this site is pretty good, I've even seen some projects to translate some VNs (Tsukihime and Shuffle) to portuguese, which is a good effort as not everyone has a fluent understanding of english.

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referring anime/manga as well drawn porn? they must have watched too much ecchi type shows instead of badass good shows

if they're referring to vn's as such, then they may be thinking of only the nukige x.x

do they at least know that Clannad/FSN/etc are VN adaptations?

It's because their first exposure to Japanese culture was CGs from nukige that they've seen floating around the 'net, so it gave them the wrong impression (that even anime and manga had that kind of material). That was years back though. I've tried enlightening them since then and they've been more accepting, at least to anime & manga, but not so much VNs.

It does bug how ignorant they're being about it sometimes, but since they don't judge me I'm okay with it (though I'm still trying to prove them wrong and it's slowly working! LOL).

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It's because their first exposure to Japanese culture was CGs from nukige that they've seen floating around the 'net, so it gave them the wrong impression (that even anime and manga had that kind of material). That was years back though. I've tried enlightening them since then and they've been more accepting, at least to anime & manga, but not so much VNs.

It does bug how ignorant they're being about it sometimes, but since they don't judge me I'm okay with it (though I'm still trying to prove them wrong and it's slowly working! LOL).

well if they liked clannad anime/etc tell them that those were VN's (mainly Clannad as that didn't have any H-scenes lul.)

but oh well

Hmmm

well at least they dont judge you for it yeah ^^

and too bad I'm in norcal and it seems everyone is in socal or something

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I'm from North Carolina, and I know at least 3 people that are into VN's as well as Anime/Manga, according to one of my co-workers, a few of his friends are into them as well, but since I don't know them, I can't say for sure, they are a rather large (comparatively) group of people who are into Anime/Manga, but I don't really associate with many people, I just know that they are around in this area, since we are right next to a large military base, and after being in the military, I can attest to the fact that there are lots of people in the military that are into Anime/Manga. Alot of people that I meet that are into Anime and Manga WANT to play VN's, but either can't figure out what they are, where to find them, where to find them in English, etc. I help where I can, but as I tend not to really associate with people outside of my small circle of friends (really just a friend of mine and his wife and kid) I don't get much helping done :P. Out of all of this though, don't take it the wrong way, I am not really a loner, hermit, outcast, etc. I am actually a very out-going person who makes friends easily, atm I just don't really feel like making any since most of my time is spent either working, or doing work on getting my business started up with my buddy.

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Utah.

There are a lot of people who like Anime/Manga here, and we have some Japanese-culture-centric stores in the malls and tons of Japanese/Korean grocery stores... but on the whole, I'm not very connected to the local fanbase.

As far as VNs go, like most places in the US, when people think of VNs they think of sleezy dating sims or sex games. Whenever I talk about it, I have to act really quick to explain that not only is there MORE out there, but that I've never played or been interested in those types of games. My current style of evangelism is to pull out Fate/Stay Night on my tablet and show a scene or two.

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<--Philippines

Me and my little sister are into VN's and anime, do not know about the other people though since I never talked about this kind of things to others except my sister.

I guess I'm the only one here who lived in PH~

@topic

I'm pretty certain that anime are very well known in my country (they even broadcast animes on TV)

I'm not sure about VN's, (probably because of those general ideas that VN=Porn)

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<--Philippines

Me and my little sister are into VN's and anime, do not know about the other people though since I never talked about this kind of things to others except my sister.

I guess I'm the only one here who lived in PH~

@topic

I'm pretty certain that anime are very well known in my country (they even broadcast animes on TV)

I'm not sure about VN's, (probably because of those general ideas that VN=Porn)

I am from PH. Well a lot of people here in my college play VN so I guess you just have to meet the people you share interest with tongue.gif

Btw, DayLighter (my slave), alden, and sols (i think) are from PH.

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