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 taken to an extreme.  There are several types that have become common in the last ten years (common as in they've popped up at least five times in the last ten years in different companies' VNs).

The Love City/School Setting

This is the second most common crazy setting that pops up in charage.  To be blunt, it is a setting where love and romance are encouraged as a part of the law or by school rules.  In  this setting, love, sex, marriage, and/or children are desirable outcomes and the 'system' in those settings goes to weirdly extreme levels of effort and expense to create the desired result.  This can be seen as a part of other crazy settings (such as Kamikaze Explorer, where having children as a student was encouraged) or on their own (as in Love Revenge, where romance was essentially forced on the students by the school's new owner), but this particular crazy setting has popped up at least fifteen times that I can think of off the top of my head in the last ten years.

The Virtual World Setting

This is the most common sci-fi setting, often mixing with fantasy ones, where a virtual world (partial or complete) is put into place either in common use or as a part of the main characters' lives.  This has a relatively low rate of occurrence for a crazy setting on this list, but it has popped up six times that I can think of in a charage in the last ten years that I can think of.  Some where 'enhanced reality' types like Harvest Overray and others were 'jack-in' types like Hoshi no Ne Sanctuary.  However, the key to making this list is that the virtual world element is key to the progression of the story, at least through the common route.

The 'Get/got sent to another world' Setting

This is the second most common fantasy charage setting.  It can range from 'After I defeated the Dark Lord' types (Valkyrie Runabout is an example of this type) and 'school life somehow in a half-medieval setting' type to ones where the protagonist just shrugs and starts living with the heroines whom he just met (Unlucky Re:Birth).  I've come across this six times from VNs made in the last ten years, and mostly they are fun.

The 'Magical/mystical school' setting

The most common fantasy setting.  This can range from Alia's Carnival types where the school is the only place where the magic/mystical element is practiced to charage based in mystical worlds (Such as Racial Merge).  I can think of about seventeen VNs that chose this type of crazy settings.

The Cross-dressing Boy attends a Girl's School

This one is... well, insane on so many levels.  However, it is also the most common 'mundane' (non sci-fi, non fantasy) crazy setting.  I can't count how many times this has popped up since Otoboku and Shugotate started the main trends of this crazy setting (for silly/weird reasons vs for serious reasons), but it is also one of my favorites, since you can usually enjoy the protagonist's antics as he tries to fit in... or fits in almost too naturally, as the case might be.

My thoughts

Crazy settings can often be amusing and add flavor to an otherwise trite concept (fall in love stories, which dominate charage), but some people are put off by them.  Also, utilizing a crazy setting in a relatively believable fashion is a rare skill amongst charage writers, and many such games fizzle in the end.  Nonetheless, I'll probably keep diving into crazy settings, if only to keep myself from going insane with boredom at all the dating and romance that dominate charage.