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About this blog

This is a blog primarily focusing on but not limited to VNs.  It is primarily designed to express my opinion on otaku media (jrpgs, anime, manga, LNs, VNs, etc), individual VNs, and otaku community issues.   Most of the posts are related to my VN of the Month and Random VN columns, originally started in threads in the forums. 

As of March of 2017, I'm also looking for people to help with VN of the Month.

Entries in this blog

An explanation of the "Golden Age of VNs"

Some veterans of reading untranslated VNs refer to the period between 2004 and 2010 as 'The Golden Age of Visual Novels'.  However, you shouldn't really take that statement at face value, as the meaning is a bit more complex than you'd think. There are some significant differences between VNs today and VNs during that period that both made it the peak of the medium's sales in Japan and produced the greatest ratio of quality VNs to crap VNs.  One of the primary differences was that, oth
Clephas

Clephas

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Random VN: Onigokko

Onigokko is a high-quality fantasy charage that was amongst the second fifty I played after I began plowing through untranslated VNs.  Unlike many I read during that time, I find I haven't really forgotten anything significant, so it turned out to be a bit harder to get into than I expected, even after half a decade.   That said, it has a lot to recommend to it, even today. The story focuses on the protagonist, Keisuke, who is also the Phantom Thief, Ura.  He and his family have been steali
Clephas

Clephas

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June Release Issues

I'm going to be blunt... I won't be playing any more of June's releases for a while.  My reasons?  I have several. 1)  My phys copy of Haruoto isn't set to arrive until mid-September, so I can't play it right now. 2)  Aiao keeps pressing my pet peeves, but I'm feeling more irritable than I really should, indicating that I simply won't be able to rate it fairly.   Problems with Aiao I've mentioned this in the past, but I intensely dislike pop culture and the entertainment busi
Clephas

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Random VN: Tasogare no Sinsemilla

This is a VN frequently recommended to those who have just gotten used to playing untranslated VNs, a story-focused mystery VN focused on the village of Minagami, a small farming town in the mountains somewhere on the main island of Japan.  I remember playing this back when it came out and enjoying it immensely... but since it was like the twentieth untranslated VN I'd played, I was still not quite to the point where I was able to grasp every single detail of the story.  In addition, I was still
Clephas

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Random VN: Shinsei ni Shite Okasubekarazu

First, this VN was written during Pulltop's brief 'golden age', by the writer of the Kamikaze Explorer, Dracu-riot, Noble Works, and Amairo Islenauts, as well as the writer of the original LoveKami.  As such, it can be said that they had something of a dream team put together for this game...  since two of the four writers were skilled moege-with-story writers.  I pulled this game out of my 'treasure box' so I would have something to revive me from my fugue state, and it actually turned out quit
Clephas

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VN Staff: Hino Wataru

Now, those who are accustomed to my praise of Akatsuki Works will probably think I have nothing but praise for Hino Wataru, and they aren't  completely wrong.  However, he has some major issues that tend to make his VNs hard for a certain type of reader to take seriously.  For better or worse, Hino Wataru is a dyed-in-the-wool chuunige writer.  Even when he isn't writing a chuunige he is writing a chuunige.  I don't think I've ever encountered a writer so completely bound by the genre's con
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VN Staff: Higashide Yuuichirou

Higashide might be familiar to Western anime fans as the writer for the Fate/Apocrypha LNs and the new anime series, or he might be familiar as the writer of Ayakashibito and Tokyo Babel.  However, of late he has definitely begun to worm his way into the collective consciousness of the Western otakus. So what kind of writer is he?  He wrote one of my single favorite VNs, Evolimit, and his works definitely have a certain... style.  Perhaps the most obvious reason why he leaves and impression
Clephas

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VN staff: Shumon Yuu

I'm going to give you my basic opinion of Shumon Yuu straight up and without embellishment... he is a genius. I generally am reluctant to call any writer a genius.  I have read thousands of stories - if I include both books and VNs - and I can only name a bare dozen or so authors/writers I can honestly and unequivocally name as geniuses.  Of course, this is a subjective viewpoint... but it is backed up by significant experience, lol. Shumon Yuu is that rarest of the rare in VN writers/
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VN of the Month June 2017 update

This is an update of the play status of June's releases. Ai yori Aoi Umi no Hate- On hiatus/stalled for the moment due to gaming exhaustion.  Plan to resume by the tenth. Haruoto Alice ＊ Gram - Planned for play after Aiao.  Pure Song Garden! - Currently being played by Dergonu. Tantei Seven- Dropped and labeled a kusoge by fun2novel, our resident mystery VN lover.  No plans to include it in the contest.
Clephas

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Delayed Satisfaction: Putting Ai Yori Aoi Umi no Hate on Hiatus

I have numerous reasons for putting Ai Yori Aoi Umi no Hate on hiatus... including that I'm tired of slice-of-life and the oddities of the setting are driving me a little crazy.  However, the fact is that I'm just tired.  Every once in a while, I fall into a sourceless funk, where I don't want to do anything - fun or not - and I'm in the middle of one of those now.  I can tell you for certain that I'm not really interested in this VN right now, despite the fact that, until about eighteen hours a
Clephas

Clephas

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The pitfalls of creating a unique setting

I'm currently playing Ai yori Aoi Umi no Hate, AXL's latest game by their 'unusual slice-of-life' team, and the setting is seriously bothering me.  It isn't that the concept is boring... there is nothing wrong with the concept of people living on a massive self-repairing ship hundreds of years after the demise of land-bound culture due to global warming.  No, the problem is the concept of the game and how it interacts with the setting.  Ok, I can live with the idea that advanced culture was
Clephas

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Akaneiro no Kyoukaisen

... are you as surprised as I am that I'm already posting on this?  It isn't because I rushed through it or concentrated on it for three days straight.  No, in this case, it is because the game is actually only about seven hours long in total... and that is probably an overestimate.  While I don't tend to judge VNs by length, I do want to be able to get to know the characters before I see them falling in love.  This game's biggest plus point is that it is story straight from beginning to en
Clephas

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Random VN: Otome ga Tsumugu Koi no Canvas

Otome ga Tsumugu Koi no Canvas is the rarest of the rare... a charage that is also a kamige.  In fact, I've only encountered three charage that I consider to be kamige out of the hundreds I've played.  How did that happen?  Well, a large part of it is the writer.  For all that his first VN was a half-nukige with an absurd setting, his style is poetic, his settings deep, and his timing and pacing of events perfect.  Another part of it is the structure.  This VN has a very, very short common
Clephas

Clephas

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Random VN: Golden Marriage (and Jewel Days)

Like many of the charage I choose to replay for this particular part of my blog, Golden Marriage is one of those VNs I thought I didn't quite give a fair chance to the first time I played them, looking back.  In retrospect, I realize I'd really come to expect great things out of Ensemble due to the examples of Koi no Canvas and Gokigen Naname.  The former is a kamige, beyond all doubt, and the latter was a deliciously dramatic look into the muddy world of money and old families.  While things tu
Clephas

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The worst and most poorly-used Tropes in VNs

I've raved on tropes before.  Many times.  However, as I have also said many times before, tropes and stereotypes do have an important place in fiction of all sorts.  The important part is to balance the use of tropes to create something interesting and unique, rather than just using them to copy a previous work or works. 1.  The 'standardized' voiceless protagonist- For better or worse, there was a long period of time when VN protagonists outside of chuunige were forbidden by industry cust
Clephas

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Ojousama wa Sunao ni Narenai

This is yet another VN from Ensemble, the company specializing in trap protagonist infiltrations and ojousama-ge.  For the first time in a while, the protagonist in this one is actually not a trap and the game actually has something approaching a good story... which was nice.  However, if you ask if it met my expectations for it, that's another story entirely. First, this VN starts with the protagonist, a part-time bodyguard from a family of such individuals, transferring into a school to s
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Anata ni Koi Suru Ren'ai Recette and VN of the Month May 2017

Clephas's comment I dropped this VN because I couldn't take the sugary texture of the thing... Sweetness and cute without depth turns me off every time.  This game looked to me like your standard yurufuwa food-business moege, and Kiririri's comments haven't really changed my viewpoint, lol. Kiririri's review (edited by Clephas) So, I originally played this game because Kasu was the artist for 2 of the heroines and I love her artwork. And well uh, it didn't start well. I started wi
Clephas

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Random VN: Kouyoku no Soleil

Kouyoku no Soleil was the first Soleil game I ever played... and from a purely action perspective, it was fun... but it lacked something from my perspective because so much of the game is steeped in pre-existing knowledge from the other games (literally, this game pulls stuff in from Shirogane, Gouen, Soukyuu, and even Primary).  Basically, this story starts with the Norns fighting one another over what to do about the original Norse Mythology world, which hasn't moved on from the moment th
Clephas

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Random VN: Primary ~Magical★Trouble★Scramble~

Primary was one of my earliest fantasy charage... and in many ways it shaped what I was willing to forgive in the genre, rather than how I looked at the genre as a whole. Primary has a lot of good points... the heroines are interesting, the protagonist's motivations are compelling, and the actual central issues of the overarching story are potentially fascinating.  However... it makes the mistake many charage of the type do, of failing to utilize the setting to its fullest extent in most of
Clephas

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Random VN: Soukyuu no Soleil

Soukyuu no Soleil stands out a bit amongst the others in the series so far, in that it is based in a world far more obviously in trouble than either of the first two games or the later games.  The main problem in the world of Soukyuu no Soleil is that all use of magic drains life from the planet itself (as opposed to the user's lifespan in Shirogane).  In that world, most of the nations of the world got fixated on using magic to defeat one another... and as a result, much of the world was destro
Clephas

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Random VN: Gouen no Soleil

(For those interested in the gameplay, I used a clear save I downloaded from the beginning to skip the battles, so you'll need to ask someone else) Gouen no Soleil is the second entry in the Soleil series and the first one where Lovecraftian elements are included.  For those wondering about cameos and characters from other games, the protagonist of this story, Nagare, was classmates with the protagonist of Shirogane, and in some of the endings, you get to see the world and some of the chara
Clephas

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Shirogane no Soleil

Shirogane no Soleil is the very first Soleil game, and it begins with Ryuuhei - the protagonist - encountering Soul Valkyrie in the ruins of the Ship of Time in Iceland (fictional).  There, he contracts with her in order to save his sister and her fellow archaeologists.  However, as a result, she constantly drains his lifespan (literally the time he has to live) away in order to use magic, fight, and even just to exist on the mortal plane of existence.   Unfortunately, at the same time he discov
Clephas

Clephas

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The Soleil series

The Soleil series by Skyfish is one of the weirder VN series out there... all the games are connected, but the connection is so twisty and strange that if you make the mistake of starting from a later game, it becomes incomprehensible.  Part of this is that all the protagonists in the series are fundamentally ignorant of the nature of the worlds they are living in, and another part of it is that the nature of incarnation and reincarnation in the series deliberately unpredictable. Basically,
Clephas

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The June 2017 releases

I am bored, so I figured I would note the non-nukige VNs scheduled to come out on PC at the end of the month, for those who are interested. Ojou-sama wa Sunao ni Narenai - This game looks to be the first serious title by Ensemble in some time (since Gokigen Naname), just going by the descriptions of the situation and the protagonist.  While the setup is definitely a twist on the Shugotate theme (sans cross-dressing), it is nonetheless one of the two games I'm seriously looking forward to fr
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Amayui Castle Meister part two: The story

I'm going to be blunt... the story of Amayui can be summed up in one word... unimpressive.  The same could be said for Kamidori and Himegari, but whenever Eushully goes off on one of their item-creation rampages, the game's story inevitably takes a back seat.  Now, that's not to say that this story doesn't have good points.  Toward the end it actually starts to resemble an IM world game... the problem is that it doesn't feel like an IM world game until near the end.  For better or worse, th
Clephas

Clephas

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