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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: 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

Clephas

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Foreshadowing: My experience in VNs

Foreshadowing is one of those elements in all forms of literature and entertainment media that is pretty much unavoidable.  To be specific, it's been around since at least the time of the Greek tragedies, lol. However, how a story uses foreshadowing says a lot about its style.  In a lot of chuunige, for example, it gets laid on pretty thick, though they generally choose their moment for 'grand effect' and melodrama.  In nakige, it is usually as a prelude to a tear-jerking event in the immed
Clephas

Clephas

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An Opinion: Grittiness vs Humanity

This is an opinion that has been a long time in forming, but I am coming around to an opinion that the more simplistic viewpoints I've possessed on the differences between American approaches to storytelling and Japanese ones are somewhat off the mark. Note:  This is a rant, it should be treated as a rant, and if it doesn't make sense to you, that is because it is my brain leaking into text on this blog. First, my original opinion: To put it simply, it was my belief that the Japanese h
Clephas

Clephas

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Clephas' Favorite VNs: Minamijuujisei Renka

Say what you want about Studio Ryokucha, but their weird plotge/charage hybrids are some of my quirkier favorites.  To be specific, Minamijuujisei Renka is my favorite game by this company, at least partially because of how deftly they sidestepped the worst of the 'high school' tropes while keeping the advantages of familiarity.   Minamijuujisei Renka is based on a fictional island still ruled by a post-colonial Caucasian aristocracy that long-since lost its connection with its long-dead or
Clephas

Clephas

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Random VNs: Ouzoku

For a lot of old fans, this is Softhouse Chara's defining masterpiece... and with good reason.  It has superb, complex gameplay that rewards careful forethought and strategic thinking and more than thirty unit types to play around with, running from common infantry to dragons.  It also has a solid story with decent storytelling (though, true to Softhouse Chara form, it isn't the focus of the game). First, I should say that the first time I played this game, I seriously screwed up in my earl
Clephas

Clephas

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Shoujo-Tachi wa Kouya o Mezasu

To be honest, I wasn’t really interested in playing this VN, as you might have noticed if you read my previous entries.  However, I ended  up playing it because, once I stopped taking the pain meds (thus going into withdrawal… viva Bucket and Water Bottle!), I had a mind just clear enough to read something on the level of a charage or slightly more complex but not enough to read something like Dies Irae or Jeanne. I’m going to be straight up about this VN… like a lot of stuff Takahiro get
Clephas

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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My new relationship with SOL

If yall haven't guessed (or just read my previous posts) my primary reason for giving up VN of the Month was being buried in SOL... well, that and the fact that playing that many new VNs a month took up too much of my time and left me none for any pursuits beyond work.  My immediate realization afterwards was that I quite simply couldn't play SOL games at all for the first few months.   After years of constant overdosing on saccharine fake romance and meaningless conversations that exist on
Clephas

Clephas

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Possibilities for August's releases: VN of the Month

Tou no Shita no Exircitus (https://vndb.org/v17835 )- This company tends to produce either excellent games or horrible games. Astronauts is constantly exploring the borderline between nukige, normal VNs, and gameplay-focused VNs and frequently tips over into one of the three. However, because they do occasionally produce good games, I can't ignore them, lol. Tenkiame (https://vndb.org/v17337 )- Because I love kitsune. Traveling Stars (https://vndb.org/v16459 )- This is the newest VN fr
Clephas

Clephas

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VN of the Year Candidates so far

This is the list, as it currently stands, of VNs being considered and those previously considered but disqualified for VN of the Year 2017.  While this year hasn't been good for producing kamige, it has succeeded in producing a number of memorable ones. Being Considered Ojou-sama no Hanbun wa Ren'ai de Dekiteimasu Oni ga Kuru. ~Ane ga Hinshi de Pinchi Desu~ Haruru Minamo ni Suisei Ginka Additions from 12/30/2017 Bakumatsu Jinchuu Houkoku Resshiden Miburo Y
Clephas

Clephas

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VN of the Month December 2016

Before I announce the VN of the Month, I'm going to go ahead and apologize to those who wanted me to play Honoguraki... to be blunt, I don't have the energy for it.  Ragnarok sucked me dry, and I need to get away from undead and demons for a while.  Moreover, I hate zombies in the first place (so many reasons), so I'd be unlikely to give a pleasant review or comment anyway. Now... it is kind of startling how so many great games got packed into a single month.  December 2016 was a monster mo
Clephas

Clephas

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Agobarrier: Some afterthoughts on a great writer

Agobarrier, who was the writer of Shuffle (the work most familiar to people here) was one of my favorite non-chuuni VN writers.  Ironically, his best works were all written after leaving Navel and its massive stream of liquid cash to form Rosebleu, my favorite comedy company.  I started going back through his entire library of works (or at least the ones I've played and own) since I heard of his death in mid-April, and as I replay his final work, Valkyrie Runabout, I feel a need to look back on
Clephas

Clephas

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March 2019: What I'm going to play

It appears that March is going to be my first death march of this year (as compared to me doing it every month for the five years previous).  The simple reason is that, for some insane reason, a bunch of companies released a bunch of interesting games all at once this month (it is technically still March). First, we have Alpha Nighthawk, a game by Liar Soft that just looked too interesting for me to ignore (which I normally would have).  My initial impression from the first scene is... that
Clephas

Clephas

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Random VN: Otome ga Musubu Tsukiyo no Kirameki

Ototsuki is one of the few, in fact the only, Ensemble trap protagonist game I hadn't at least tried.  There were a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one was that it came out after my burnout on SOL reached its peak.  By that time, I had no energy for any kind of SOL VNs, even ones in genres I normally liked.  In retrospect, I'm glad I waited until I recovered before playing this, because this is the game that proves that Ensemble still has potential as a company, despite the last five
Clephas

Clephas

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Renai Kyoushitsu

Yes, despite myself, I played this.  Renai Kyoushitsu is the first VN from an entirely new company (the writer and artist are both new to VNs as well), and it seems to be, in concept, a simple charage of the type where a male protagonist goes to a newly-coed former girls' school and finds himself the only guy (a fairly normal situation in VNs, though less so in the last few years).  The VN has a really weird atmosphere (not psycho-weird, but rather just plain weird) at first, primarily because t
Clephas

Clephas

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Random VN: Tojita Sekai no Tori Colony

This VN is an odd duck on my long list of recommended VNs.  While its existence as a time loop story is a trope, the way the game's story handles it is pretty interesting.  I went ahead and revealed this as a loop story because you find it out so early on that hiding it as a spoiler is meaningless.  The game's story begins with the protagonist meeting (and helping out) Nodoka, one of the four heroines, and her confessing her love to him on the next day when she transfers into the class.  Wh
Clephas

Clephas

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Isekai Mono: 'Otherworld travels' as a genre

Traveling to other worlds is so common a plot element in otaku media that it has actually become a fantasy sub-genre in and of itself.  This is actually one of my favorite plot elements... if it isn't screwed up magnificently (like in RE:Zero) by putting the wrong sort of person into the mess. The first otaku media that hit me with this was The Vision of Escaflowne, followed by Fushigi Yuugi.  The latter isn't one of my favorite anime, but I did like it up to a point.  The former is one of
Clephas

Clephas

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Toki ga Tsumugu Yakusoku Part 3: Final thoughts

First, I should comment on Misaki's route... As is to be expected of a true route in a VN with as much story as this one, Misaki's route is incomparable in both length and content to the other three routes.  In terms of emotional impact, it literally leaves the other routes in the dust, while finishing off the other heroines' issues almost as if they were a mere aside, lol.  That said, not all the emotions associated with this route are positive... there are some seriously heartbreaking mom
Clephas

Clephas

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Tasogare no Folklore

I do not regret playing this game. I needed to say this first, because this game has a pretty high level of emotional impact.  The actual characters are quiet for the most part, but the relationships in this game are so twisted that even thinking about them being real would make a saint wince.  This story centers around a young personal servant, Kumagata Arima, and his young mistress, Otobe Supika.  It is the Taishou Era (pre-WWII, late teens to late twenties of the twentieth century),
Clephas

Clephas

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VNs

Random VN: Raillore no Ryakudatsusha

Raillore is 3rdeye's  most recent chuunige, made back in 2019.  At the time, I tried to play it and dropped it after the prologue, for a number of reasons.  The primary reason was the lack of narration in combat scenes... For some reason, 3rdEye has almost no narration in this game, comparative even to charage.  Instead, battle scenes are done using CGs, brief animations, and sound-effects.  Unfortunately, this means you generally have no idea of what is going on, due to the limitations of such
Clephas

Clephas in VNs

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Random VN: Meguri, Hitohira part 1

Due to work and other stuff, I hadn't had time to really get into this until recently, and with friday signaling the release of October's list of VNs, at least one of which (Deep One) will play immediately, I felt that it would be fitting to go ahead and give you my initial impression  of the game.  My first impression, after playing through the prologue, was that, while this game is pretty old, it is also very... familiar in an odd way.  At first, I couldn't figure out where that impressio
Clephas

Clephas

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Crazy Charage Settings

Now, I love nothing more than an interesting setting, and I'm tired of normal charage in general... so one of the biggest points that can be used to draw me into a charage is a crazy setting.  Crazy charage settings are settings that have no possibility whatsoever of happening in real life or are so far outside of common sense that they are inconceivable as a real possibility to most people.  This includes fantasy settings and sci-fi settings, but more often it includes a simple concept tak
Clephas

Clephas

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JRPG series: Shin Megami Tensei

I've been friendly with the Shin Megami Tensei series for over twenty years now, since the release of the incredibly crappy localization of the original Persona on the ps1 (believe me, it is one of the worst localizations of all time).  That said, I saw the series as just a darker than normal jrpg series... until I played SMT: Nocturne for the PS2. Nocturne is frequently referred to, both seriously and derisively, as 'Pokemon with demons and a cohesive story'.  Seriously.  While the Persona
Clephas

Clephas

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Tokubetsu na Bonjin no Seikatsu

No, the title isn't the name of a VN... at least as far as I know.  It essentially means 'the lifestyle of a special normal/average person'.  This is the wording that came to mind when I thought about the standard charage protagonist... Now, slice-of-life is by nature just that... a slice of the characters' lives outside of whatever conflict or set of events that determines the flow of the story.  There are slice-of-life moments in almost all VNs (except for a few sex-only nukige, mahou sho
Clephas

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
Clephas

Clephas

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