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Slur posted:I also was recently gifted a copy of this all-ages VN called Shan Gui. If anyone's gone through it, can they tell me anything about it before I boot it up? Cheers. It's a kinetic novel (no branching paths, just one storyline), and it's very short so I don't know if there's really that much to tell without spoiling it. At its core it's just an atmospheric little story about a girl making a friend. Might as well experience it for yourself if you're interested -- it'll only take like an hour out of your life.
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Mar 17, 2015 09:16
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LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:Any VNs in this Steam sale worth the time? World End Economica is supposed to be good if you have any interest at all in, well, economics.
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Aug 12, 2015 04:07
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Getsuya posted:http://store.steampowered.com/app/383460 No way of tracking your previous choices actually seems like a pretty significant annoyance for a game that has like 30 bad ends in it. Oh well; if I have trouble I can always just look up a guide, I guess.
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Oct 31, 2015 07:05
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There was some talk about Sound of Drop earlier in the thread and I've played enough to feel comfortable reviewing it at this point, so in case anyone was still on the fence about it here goes. You play as high schooler Mayumi, who's on a trip to the local aquarium with her best friend/implied potential love interest Himeno. The aquarium is the subject of many urban legends about eerie phenomena occurring there, and Mayumi's sister disappeared mysteriously there five years ago. When Mayumi catches a glimpse of a girl who looks just like her sister, she runs after her, becoming separated from Himeno and lost in the aquarium. Obviously that's about when things start to go horribly wrong, because there wouldn't be much of a story if they didn't. The VN starts with a content warning about violence and horror, and some pretty horrible things can in fact happen to you and other characters, but the description isn't usually excessively graphic -- if you could deal with the level of violence in, say, 999, you should be fine. Some of the situations you find yourself in are genuinely unsettling, although occasionally the inherent silliness of getting murdered over and over again by malevolent aquatic life was hard for me to ignore. Seriously, everything in the whole drat aquarium is trying to kill you somehow, it's like playing a NES platformer in visual novel form. While the game doesn't track which decisions you've already made for you, that really isn't much of a problem in practice: most choices either advance the plot or kill you pretty quickly, so you can just save at each decision point and collect all the deaths fairly easily if you want to. (It's worth seeing them: most of the bad ends give you clues of some sort about the nature of the situation you're in.) There are 27 bad endings and four "true" endings: two of the true endings are only accessible after you've already seen one of the other two, but the skip function is super fast and makes repeat playthroughs painless. It's a fairly short VN overall; you can get from start to finish in a few hours on your first playthrough, depending on how fast a reader you are and how thorough you want to be about collecting bad ends. The writing and translation are generally decent, aside from a few typos. Between the shortness of the story and the fact that you spend a lot of it alone, most of the characters other than Mayumi and Himeno don't really get a whole lot of screen time or development, but the characters do all have well-defined personalities and make a strong impression when they appear. The art and music generally do a great job of conveying the VN's mood and atmosphere, although as Getsuya mentioned there's no voice acting. Overall I'm pretty impressed with the game. At the time I write this it's 20% off for another 12 hours, so now's as good a time as any to, uh, take the plunge.
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Nov 6, 2015 05:33
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Ryoshi posted:How does this work, is it possible to redeem the digital copy on Vita or do you need to go for the 99$ tier? At this point they've probably got a fair chance as long as there's a big surge in the last couple of days. Looking at the past week on kicktraq, adding the PS Vita tier actually pulled in a surprising amount of money and new backers for how pricey it was.
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Jan 28, 2016 22:47
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Lemon Curdistan posted:I wish Prince of Stride had an English translation, since I'm enjoying the anime. I guess if you specifically want something that plays like a modern-Persona-style life sim, there's Cherry Tree High Comedy Club. It's pretty short, though, and its sequel is just a conventional VN.
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Feb 18, 2016 22:32
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Getsuya posted:Anyone played WAS -Hourglass of Lepidoptera-? I was interested when I saw it on Steam but I haven't heard anything about it. Doesn't seem like a romance VN which instantly makes it more interesting to me. Oh, I have a friend who's played that one. He said he liked some of the characters but the writing often dips into cheap sexist and homophobic jokes and he found it offputting enough that he can't really recommend it.
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Feb 22, 2016 01:17
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To the person who was asking about Hourglass of Lepidoptera earlier: it just got pulled from Steam due to various fuckery by the Japanese devs, so, uh, I guess that makes your decision for you.
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Mar 4, 2016 00:29
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Well, I've gone ahead and bent the ear of my friend who works for Sekai Project about it, so we'll see if anything comes of that, I guess.
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Mar 4, 2016 03:31
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Your Dunkle Sans posted:By "on the level of," I mean of the (high) quality of 999/VLR. There are other horror visual novels like Banshee's Last Cry but they aren't nearly as good, scary, or as engaging as something like 999. They don't have vivid descriptions of a guy's blown out insides looking like spaghetti or a grotesque blooming flower in a sea of blood at the least. BLC started as an SNES game so that's probably why it seems primitive. Sound of Drop might be worth looking at; the descriptions of violence in that game actually reminded me quite a lot of the way 999 handled it. It's got that same combination of graphic description but detached, almost clinical detail to it. Gameplay is pretty much straightforward CYOA-style read-and-make-a-choice, with most of the choices past the intro sequence either advancing the plot or leading to a quick and messy death: it's basically a gauntlet with a couple of branching paths. Be warned that it's quite short (you can get either of the two normal endings in a couple of hours if you're a fast reader, and then there are two NG+-only alternate routes that add a fair bit of extra content) and the premise may or may not land for you as effective horror (it's a haunted aquarium, there are some genuinely well-written and unsettling scenes in the game but they're still working against the fact that there's something inherently silly about the idea of deadly fish ghosts). Thuryl fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Mar 5, 2016 |
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Mar 5, 2016 20:21
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So a lot of you have probably heard about Flowers' translation being a bit of a disaster. The official word from JAST seems to be that they hosed up by releasing a demo before doing adequate QA on it and they're delaying the release until it isn't a disaster any more. Here's hoping they manage to fix it.
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Mar 6, 2016 01:06
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:999 was supposed to be horror? What? I never even got slight horror vibes from it. I'd personally classify 999 as a thriller rather than horror, since the overriding moods are suspense and paranoia rather than dread, but I can see how someone who likes horror VNs would like it.
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Mar 6, 2016 01:28
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Yeah, as far as I can tell it's in the same boat as Kindred Spirits in that there are a couple of scenes with boobs in them but no genitals are shown.
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Apr 17, 2016 02:55
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Getsuya posted:Cool. I like having less decisions to make in my life. Hey, guess what's coming to Steam this month. (Different game, but same developer and series.)
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Jun 10, 2016 10:39
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SweetBro posted:Matter of perspective imo. The original was like 40-50 hours long depending on how fast you read. 15 of which was arguably the common route. Considering that the common route should obviously be shorter since you've already been introduced to all of the character, I don't think that this is such a bad deal since I rather not have to read through a bunch of uninteresting fluff. Maybe it's not as good of a value proposition as the first one, but I don't think 20-25 hours for $40 is a bad value either. poo poo, that's less than what a new audio-book of that length would cost. I'm not sure who told you that. The all-ages version doesn't remove all sexual references, only the sex scenes. This actually creates a couple of odd little gaps in the story where you might only realise that two characters had sex because it gets mentioned in dialogue much later on, although it's usually not that big a deal.
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Jun 23, 2016 09:51
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FractalSandwich posted:I think I'd like otome games, but I've become a hardline misandrist and I never want to hear another story about a man ever again. Are there any otome games on Steam that are about, I don't know, women's friendships? Or anything else but dudes? I'd suggest going through Hella Yuri's recommendations list for things that look like visual novels but I'm assuming you did that already.
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Jul 5, 2016 12:27
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Sakurazuka posted:Little Lily Princess is decent too, apart from the dumb busy work stats to unlock routes thing Hanako had a blog post about that during development: it was a deliberate walk back from LLTQ where a lot of players got frustrated by realising partway through the game that they didn't have the stats to survive and wouldn't be able to get them without starting over or reloading from a long time ago. She kinda walked pretty far in the other direction to the point where the existence of stats at all feels a little vestigial, but I do feel like it still gives some extra impact to the shift from Act 1 to Act 2, where all of your stats and tasks change.
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Jul 5, 2016 13:40
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Endorph posted:1) how does the phrase 'female/female romantic content' make a bad first impression? you can't really call it 'lesbian romance' or anything because some of the characters involved might be bi or whatever It's useful in the other direction as well, if there's a specific game you're already looking at and you want to know exactly how gay you can be in it before you make a purchasing decision
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Jul 5, 2016 13:57
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Getsuya posted:Anyone tried out Nurse Love Addiction yet? It's a yuri nurse VN on Steam. It's a little spendy but I think it should be worth it. I played the 1st game in the series on PSP and it was great. Not just the yuri and really charming art but actually the nursing stuff itself. They got actual nurses to come sit in on all the storyboarding and it was based on their tales of what being a nurse in Japan is actually like. It gets so in-depth you'd almost think it was meant to be fetish-y except the nursing scenes are very non-sexual and are treated very seriously. I haven't got that far into it, but I'm a couple of hours in and I'm liking the characters so far, and the quality of the translation seems pretty good too. One thing that people are likely to find offputting is that one of the four romance options is your ~non-blood-related~ sister. I mean, you can just not do that path but it's still there.
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Jul 24, 2016 04:27
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FractalSandwich posted:Okay, I got an ending. Of sorts. So far this seems to be the story of a nice young lady who blunders into several very unhealthy relationships, and the game does not like it if she manages to escape from them all. In fairness you've just described like 70% of all otome games there So far Itsuki seems like the most fun of all the characters and also the most likely to ruin Asuka's life, so I think I'll be going for her route first.
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Jul 28, 2016 12:08
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FractalSandwich posted:That's weird, I got the non-ending first by accident, and there weren't any spoilers in it. Maybe they patched that out? Well, or the person who wrote the walkthrough is just especially fussy about anything resembling a spoiler. Anyway, I've played a little more and this game is in fact exactly as insane as people were saying. I almost don't want to post this even in spoiler tags, even though it only spoils one scene involving a minor character, because it's such an incredibly goddamn deranged moment that you should all see it for yourselves. But here goes. Pop quiz! You're a trainee nurse observing a hospital, under strict instructions not to attempt any actual nursing yet. You see a patient who's pissed herself in the hallway while trying to get to the bathroom and is severely distressed about it. Do you: 1) Stand back and let the more experienced staff handle it 2) Step in to comfort the patient 3) deliberately piss yourself in front of her, right there in the hallway, so that she'll be less embarrassed If you answered 3, congratulations! You might be the protagonist of Nurse Love Addiction! Also, seek help. This game is amazing. I don't know if I can say it's good, but it's amazing.
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Jul 29, 2016 12:46
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In fairness, all the other characters react to that like you'd expect normal human beings to. But yeah. It's a thing that happens.
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Jul 29, 2016 12:51
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FractalSandwich posted:I haven't decided if I'm going to do them yet. I'm not sure I want to see them. Having just seen Itsuki's bad ending, I can confirm that it's worth seeing just to watch it go from depressing to incredibly hosed up at the very end once you realise what the story is implying. Some more general notes on the game now that I've played through to an ending, in case anyone is still on the fence about it (and hasn't already been unsold by my earlier post): * It's the kind of story where pretty much every character is a lesbian if their sexuality comes up in the game at all, and everyone treats this as completely normal and unremarkable. Nobody angsts about the difficulties of same-sex relationships. They angst about many other things, but not that. * The translation is pretty good overall, but it could have used a little more time checking it over; there are a few noticeable technical issues like bits of text overflowing the window in places, although you can still see any cut-off text by checking the backlog. * As others have said, the game does mostly drop the nursing school slice-of-life stuff and go into full-on Trauma-Center-meets-Days-of-our-Lives mode once you're locked into one character's route, but that's not until about 75% of the way through the game, at least for Itsuki's route. * The protagonist does eventually grow a spine (again, on Itsuki's route: I can't speak for the others yet). It is a welcome development when it happens, even if she doesn't always achieve much with it. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 15:02
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MegaZeroX posted:So Sekai Project announced Fatal Twelve. The concept seems pretty interesting. Hopefully it turns out to be a good VN. I'm looking forward to it. It's by the same studio as Sound of Drop, a horror VN that slid under the radar a bit when it came out but that I enjoyed quite a bit.
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Aug 14, 2016 13:41
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It's not like completing one game is an ironclad guarantee of being able to complete more, of course, especially since asking for outside money often comes with a big increase in the scale and complexity of your project compared to your prior work; look at how Dysfunctional Systems' dev team fell apart after their Kickstarter. They had the skills to make a VN, but they didn't know how to manage a budget, and that's a lot harder to prove you can do until after you've already found someone willing to give you money. Backing a project is always a risk even when the developers have a decent track record.
Thuryl fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Feb 4, 2017 |
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Feb 4, 2017 03:33
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Nurse Love Addiction starts out looking like a relatively down-to-earth slice of life VN about nursing students with some weirdly-written characters and turns into an increasingly hosed up and implausible soap opera starting from about the point where you lock in a route choice. I don't regret buying it but I have really, really bad taste so you probably shouldn't take that as a recommendation.
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Feb 15, 2017 16:19
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astr0man posted:SubaHibi is not all-ages. In case there's any doubt about just how not all-ages it is: the Steam version includes only the first chapter of the game, out of six. The entire other five chapters have to be patched in. This isn't really a situation where you can just go "oh, there's a Steam release, just talk about the content that's included in that".
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Sep 13, 2017 03:53
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Barent posted:Tangentially related, anyone planning on seeing the HF movie? I bought my ticket for the showing where I live. I'm considering it. Looks like the nearest cinema is showing it next Thursday, so I have a while to decide. (I was pretty surprised to see a big mainstream cinema showing it at all, even in a very limited number of sessions.)
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Nov 10, 2017 20:37
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Irukandji Syndrome posted:Thanks for the Corpse Party info. As far as I can tell, the latest news is that he still intends to make it and it still has no particular release date.
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Dec 21, 2017 07:33
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Irritated Goat posted:SubaHibi is something but it requires the 18+ patch and I usually play these remoted in from work so NSFW is not a good idea. I wouldn't recommend it anyway, at least not if you're looking for a satisfying mystery. It resorts to some pretty contrived plot devices to keep information hidden from the player, and even then you'll probably have figured out all the major twists by around halfway through. Looking at your post history in the thread, it seems like most of the things I'd recommend are things you've already played. Maybe SeaBed will be good? I haven't played it yet but it sounds promising.
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Dec 26, 2017 00:05
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And of course then there's the way that Japanese has a whole bunch of different first-person pronouns that have no equivalent in English. Translating a story with multiple narrators and frequent perspective shifts where the reader's supposed to figure out who's saying what by what pronouns they're using for themselves is always a fun time.
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Mar 23, 2018 01:19
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FractalSandwich posted:Game design as applied to visual novels and other kinds of IF is a really interesting field. It's an area I'd like to explore, if I were a better writer. Unfortunately, playing video games for 25 years has poisoned my mind, and now I don't know how to tell anything but a crappy video game story. I forget if I've posted this article in this thread before, but I think it's a useful way of categorizing different plot structures in games. The author's more into western IF and CYOA books than VNs, but the structures apply pretty easily to VNs as well.
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Mar 24, 2018 04:10
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dmboogie posted:you know, i was enjoying DRV3 now that it finally costs less then $60. i still am enjoying it. but the culprit for the first case is some real bullshit. not like, fun bullshit that i expect from the series, "who gave you the right to write a murder mystery" bullshit (thematic spoilers for DRV3 I guess, if you don't want a vague forewarning about where it's going with all this stuff) DRV3 is pretty much purposely designed to disappoint and annoy the player, and this won't be the last time it does so. Think of it as the Funny Games of visual novels and you won't be too far off.
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Jun 23, 2018 05:23
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A Light in the Dark is a VN that came out recently from a Taiwanese studio, and I loved it. (Full disclosure: I worked on the game as a QA tester, so I might have some emotional attachment to it, but I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't think it was good.) At the start of the game you awaken tied up in a lovely apartment with a strange woman kicking you in the stomach, and things pretty much get worse for you from there. The art is beautiful and contributes greatly to the game's dark, stressful atmosphere, and the music is mostly quiet and low-key but really comes into its own for tense moments. The game mechanics help to build the sense of tension too, with important choices being put on a timer and the game picking for you if you don't make a decision in time. There are significant adventure game elements, with sections of downtime when you can investigate your surroundings to search for a means of escape, or try to talk to your kidnappers about various topics to build a rapport with them or learn about their motives. Your initial goal is to escape alive, but as the game goes on and you learn more details about the situation you're in, you might find yourself wanting to uncover the deeper truth behind your kidnapping and do something about it. It's kinda short, but there's a ton of choices and several very different endings, so it's designed to be replayed at least a few times. I have 24 hours in it on Steam, so you can consider that an upper bound on playtime from someone exhaustively playing and replaying every route and trying out every option. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Jul 3, 2018 12:42
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LibrarianCroaker posted:I finished up Fatal Twelve a couple of days ago and loved it. Any particular recommendations based on that? Sound of Drop is by the same devs, so you could check that out. It's a lot shorter and differently structured (less of a character study and more of a straightforward horror story with tons of bad endings for you to avoid or collect), but it does share Fatal Twelve's theme of the lingering regrets of the dead (plus some significant yuri undertones, although not quite as overt as in Fatal Twelve). If you could narrow down what specifically you liked about it, I could probably come up with some other recommendations.
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Nov 3, 2018 11:07
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LibrarianCroaker posted:I liked that it was straightforwardly gay, I liked that even though it wasn't a romance, the romance was important to the plot, I liked that the bad ends were well telegraphed, and the 16 hours it took me was a pretty good length for me. Hmm, in that case you might like Ne no Kami as a supernatural action-adventure story with a major yuri subplot. It's pretty much a kinetic novel, though; there's one choice in part 2 and that's it, so if alternate ending options are important to you it's not really that kind of game. (Also, disclosure time again: this is another game I did QA work on, so I probably have an emotional attachment to it because of that, but I do think it's a good game on its own merits.) If you want something sorta similar but with more choices, there's also Aoishiro, but that only has a fan translation.
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Nov 5, 2018 01:41
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I liked 999's writing best out of the trilogy, but the original DS release was pretty rough to actually play, since you'd end up having to redo a lot of the puzzle rooms if you didn't read a guide to know the optimal route to take. I think the rereleases on other platforms fix that, but at the cost of some pretty cool storytelling gimmicks that relied on the DS screen layout.
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Dec 11, 2018 09:51
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Ryuga Death posted:What was changed for the re-releases? I think the iOS version removed the puzzles entirely, making the game into a pure VN, while the Steam version lets you skip parts that you've already played through.
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Dec 11, 2018 10:28
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FractalSandwich posted:I guess it's because nobody really makes classical dating sims anymore, and almost none of the ones that were made when they were more popular came out in English. There are still fairly recent examples in Japan, but mostly for mobile platforms; Konami's still working on the latest edition of Love Plus. But yeah, outside of the mobile market I think the design space for them has been encroached upon by RPGs with heavy lifesim elements. Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:It's mostly a meaningless semantics thing, I guess. Most people think of the two as the same, so if you hear someone say "dating sim" these days, there's a good chance they mean games like Clannad anyway. I think it's kind of reductive because when people think of the words "dating sim," they tend to get a distorted view of what these games are about, but I guess it doesn't really matter in the end. We've got no good terms for games like Clannad anyway. There's always the option of just borrowing the Japanese term and using "ren'ai game" for games of any mechanical genre where pursuing romance is the primary focus, if you don't mind the fact that it will instantly mark you as a huge weeb
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Dec 22, 2018 10:39
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Ryuga Death posted:Does anyone here have any opinions on A light in the dark? Let me find my post on it from when it came out. The short version is that it's a very good social thriller if that's what you're in the market for. Thuryl posted:A Light in the Dark is a VN that came out recently from a Taiwanese studio, and I loved it.
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Feb 4, 2019 23:48
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