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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

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

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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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
Clephas

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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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Newton to Ringo no Ki

... Laplacian isn't a company I had any hopes for, after how much of a kusoge their first game, Kimi to Yumemishi was.  However, Newton to Ringo no Ki is a pleasant surprise, with a lot of nostalgia for people, like me, who were born in the mid to early eighties. Why?  Because this is, in some ways, a tribute to the Back to the Future movies I watched as a kid.  While the time travel style is switched from a car to a telescope and there are a few minor differences (no vanishing protagonists
Clephas

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Random VNs: Evolimit

Now, if you asked me my top three VNs of all time, I would honestly put this one as one of those three, no matter how often the other two get rotated out.  Evolimit, in my mind at least, shows off the best of Higashide Yuuichirou's writing in combination with Propeller's unique art style and superior musical direction and composition.  Oh, and incidentally, this is the sixth time I've played this game from beginning to end, reading all the endings... that I can still find a VN enjoyable aft
Clephas

Clephas

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Hanidebi! Honey & Devil

I thought so after playing Koiken Otome... but this company is absolutely incapable of properly utilizing their settings.  Good music, mostly good characters (the protagonist sucks), decent art... but so empty of content it isn't even funny.  The sex obsession from beginning to end is carried out poorly, the actual paths have too much ichaicha, and the potentially humorous elements fall short of where they would have gone in any other game.  In other words, this is yet another kusoge f
Clephas

Clephas

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Character settings, game settings, and their use

This is a theme that actually doesn't come up very often in my reviews/commentaries on VNs these days, primarily because most VNs use what settings - whether those of the characters or of the game itself - to at least an adequate degree.  There are actually very few VNs that include setting elements that are interesting but never end up used... because it irritates the hell out of people who actually pay attention. The most recent example, which made me go off on a foul-mouthed tirade in pr
Clephas

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Random VN: Psycho Logic Love Comedy

This one is a doujin VN by Initial, a doujin group that seems to have pretty varied tastes.  To be honest... I wasn't expecting what I got with this VN.  This is a kinetic novel, meaning that there is only one story that is progressed without any branches or choices.  You progress through the story by picking your chapters, which go in in order from one to forty-six.  The game itself is about eight hours in length, and it is a science-fiction/fantasy VN. The story begins in a city walled in
Clephas

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Utawarerumono Mask of Deception

First, I should note that this is the first half of the game and as such, it might be wise to wait until the second half comes out in September before trying it.  Second, this game is based some time (around sixteen to nineteen years) after the original Utawarerumono in the much larger nation of Yamato, on the continent across the sea.  For those who don't want spoilers about the original game, STOP HERE. Second, I will note the differences between the anime and the game.  There are numerou
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JRPG: Nier Automata

The Nier/Drakengard series is one of the single weirdest series out there.  It's games range from DW-style man vs armies  with dragon flight simulation elements to heavy action-rpgs like the Nier games.  The Nier series originates with one of Drakengard's endings, where the protagonist and his dragon get thrown into another dimension and end up getting impaled on the Tokyo Tower after having it out with the JSDF.  This leads to the events of Nier, a thousand years later.  The original Nier'
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Random VNs: Bradyon Veda

Bradyon Veda is one of the hardest to read VNs out there... right up there with Kajiri Kamui Kagura, if for different reasons.  One reason is the frequent usage of internal jargon, obscure (to an outsider) physics terms, and other setting issues.  The other reason is that the writer is, similarly to Masada, in love with spellchants and rarely-used kanji.  That said, Bradyon Veda is science fiction and science-fantasy, not fantasy.  One of the biggest distinctions between this game and fanta
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Semiramis no Tenbin: Characters

Like Akagoei, I've previously posted on Semiramis no Tenbin, so I'm going to limit my comments to some generalities and character descriptions.  This game, for the most part, focuses on the manipulative efforts of one Kamio Ami, the game's main heroine, seen from the point of view of Hayami Reiji.  The game starts out with Reiji being tricked into having sex with Ami, who then proceeds to blackmail him into giving her a place to stay.  He then ends up being at her side as she manipulates the hel
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Akatsuki no Goei (series) Characters

Since I've posted previously on Akatsuki no Goei as a trilogy, I thought I would instead make a description of the setting and a list of characters and their roles in the story, with a personal assessment attached.   I'm pretty sure I missed at least one of the Route C heroines, but there are so many of them...  Setting The setting of the Akagoei series (several generations before the events in the Reminiscence series, incidentally) is in a fictional version of Japan.  In this version
Clephas

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Majo to Tsurugi to Sen no Tsuki

This review was written by Dergonu   Majo to Tsurugi to Sen no Tsuki Majo to Tsurugi to Sen no Tsuki is the newest game in Kai's mahou shoujo series. (There is no need to play the two previous games in order to follow the story in this one. I personally did not, and understood everything just fine. The game does a very good job of explaining everything that happened in previous games properly for new readers. Of course, reading a general summary of the two previous games will h
Clephas

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The relativity of inconvenience

One of the things I've experienced more and more in the last decade as a part of 'the generation gap' is a difference between our interpretations of the word 'inconvenience', especially when it comes to games and devices. Understand, when I say 'inconvenience', it generally means 'it doesn't have the functions I find useful'.  When I talk to people who were born after the year 2000, it is almost always 'too many functions I don't know how to use/are not intuitive to me'.  Perhaps the m
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Random VNs: A second play of World Election

As you can see above, this isn't the first time I've played this game, and I had a reason for going back to it... a good one.  To be blunt, I thought I hadn't given it a fair review, as it seemed a lot better as the memories soaked into my backbrain than it seemed immediately after.  So, naturally, I decided to play it again after a year had passed (my minimum for replaying non-chuunige). First, I should say that my view of the common route is pretty much the same as the first time I played
Clephas

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My list of the greatest charage

This list isn't in any particular order, but I'm going to separate out the fantasy ones from the non-fantasy for the sake of those who have no taste in fantasy elements.  This list excludes nakige and utsuge.  I got a request to make a charage list a while back, but I only got around to it today.   Fantasy World Election (first-class) Floral Flowlove (kamige) Minamijuujisei Renka Koiiro Soramoyou Senren Banka Ore no Tsure wa Hitodenashi Yomegami
Clephas

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