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So I finally made to 1000 posts...none of you care, but I'm still gonna make this post for the percentage of you that will look at this post. I arrived here in early October. October 12th to be exact and it took me a while to adapt to this community. Once that happened, I spammed my way to 500 posts on January 27th. By that point, I really only talked to people in the chat at that point and sometimes with people in PMs and the forums and now, I've talked to a lot of you in some way. I've had a lot of fun in these forums because of the people I will be mentioning later on and will continue to have fun in the future. This site has changed me in some way. Before these forums, I didn't have any motivation to learn Japanese and was a complete vanilla fag and after a few months here, I am very slowly on my way to learning Japanese (I blame school and/or my laziness) and am now enjoying rape hentai. Now before some of you call the cops on me for saying that, I will now thank some people that I feel deserve mentioning. Also, I will be mentioning some people more than once and yes, you are free to make multiple yaoi fanfics about it @mitchhamilton. First of all, my spam chat group that started as a plan to spam Fuwanovel with @Dergonu and @CeruleanGamer quickly became a place to chat. I usually spend most of my time in these forums there because of some of the people who are regulars. Those regulars are @Arcadeotic, @DarkZedge, @Nashetania, @Kiriririri, @Kawasumi, and @TexasDice and then there are the people who show up once in a while like @Deep Blue, @XReaper, @Canicheslayer, @Funyarinpa, @Vorathiel, and @Okarin. You guys have made the chat fun to participate in even if you spam way too much to keep up with all the posts. We also added @Kaguya and @Clephas recently and hopefully you guys will post often. Now for the mod team @Nosebleed, @Down, @Kaguya, @Eclipsed, @Zenophilious, @Flutterz, and @Kurisu-Chan. You guys have done a great job keeping these forums in check and I hope you continue doing that. I've talked with some of you on occasion in the Phase PM group so I don't know you as well as I could but I hope to talk with you a lot more now that I've actually started talking to people on this site. Here's to @Kaguya winning the mod war and I'm not sorry for stealing borrowing your gimmick @Kurisu-Chan. Next, the VNTL crew of @Tay, @Decay, and @Zakamutt. I've been reading VNTL since April and I've enjoyed all the posts you make on them. I've barely talked to any of you and I hope to in the near future as long as @Nosebleed doesn't break the forums again. #blameNosebleed And finally, for the chat group of @greenshadow622, @Velociraptor, @Flutterz, @Ayana, @gijimu, and I can't currently remember the rest so if I forgot you, I don't care. Obvious sarcasm aside, you guys have made the chat fun to be in. I enjoyed all those pointless discussions about our masturbation habits and politics. And with that, my post is complete. Again, thank you for making these forums fun for me and I hope to have a lot more fun in the future.

people are actually wondering why maitetsu? Did you see how many bought the all ages nekopara versions lol. And nekopara actually leads me to what I wanted to talk about, PRODUCTION VALUE. Maitetsu has A LOT of it, including animated sprites even in the CGs (you cant deny that when you talk about vns, then this actually counts as something "out of the ordinary"), the game engine they use is solid as hell.

Licensing a definitive loli-ge from an acclaimed developer of lolicon games--to then censor the lolis--is perhaps Dovac's finest moment. He managed to troll lolicons, SJWs, and amaze and confuse the VN community all in one fell swoop. While no one can quite imagine what twisted mind could possibly conceive that this was a good idea, all can agree that this moment will go down in history as the moment that the VN community met terrorism--and its face was Dovac.

Hey everyone! Fantastic news from the Aokana TL front! The private Facebook group has been working extremely hard to release the game for all of you, and I just wanted to update all of you on their progress: A common route on April 20th of 2016 in 5 different languages? Look forward to it! If you'd like to read the game early, feel free to support this amazing group. In addition, the project leader (who was very upset about seeing the project sold to Sekai Project and seemed to fuel his project out of pure hatred for the one I was running) plans to pitch their TL to sprite: Good luck guys, and see you on the TL scene!

I do have other things to invest my time into like masturbation and hentai and I see what you mean now.

Chikan (public molestation) is an integral part of Japanese train culture.

Ok, I'm back in the land of the living after a very late night. So a few comments: Seriously, there were a lot of people chuckling at me about the Maitetsu question. I saw the lolis and kind of knew what I was signing up for, but I wasn't quite aware of the extent of the H content and quite how young the characters looked. Anyway, I actually just tweeted at dovac about that question and got an interesting response: "We had internal discussions about this, but just can't talk about it at this time." This is very much in line with how I interpret their response last night: it wasn't a denial, or even a hinted denial, of any kind of 18+ release. It was an extremely neutral question dodge. I really don't know what to expect - if it were already decided to be something as simple as "there will be no H content", I don't think they would be responding the way they are. My guess is that it's still an in-progress discussion, both with the developer and internally, trying to figure out what kind of balance they should tread to maintain their reputation with all camps and to make the release have the maximum positive impact. None of us is in a position to predict the future here - let's wait and see what happens. Regardless, I actually don't care - I almost certainly will play Maitetsu, because the idea is cute, the art looks freaking gorgeous, and I have no problem with the occasional moege (I seriously love IMHHW, censorship, bad translation, and all). And when I do play Maitetsu, you can bet I'm going to play that censored Steam release. I don't know why people are talking about Kickstarters WRT the SP announcements. They said absolutely nothing about it at SakuraCon, and I don't think they said anything about Kickstarter at Anime Boston either. Each time they announce something is going through Kickstarter, it's been announced as having a Kickstarter from the beginning, right? I think there's clearly not going to be one for any of this stuff. Will SP get a little less incomprehensible hate about Kickstarter after this? Probably not. I am pretty hyped about Ley Line. It's good to see SP had another solid announcement up their sleeve for Boston and didn't dump everything at SakuraCon. I'm actually really happy about the recent pattern of fan translation projects turning into officially-licensed releases. Fan translators deserve compensation for their work, and as a significant and growing group of fans, we deserve to be taken seriously by the original developers and publishers. This new trend, and the very clear rapid growth of the US VN-reading market over the last couple years, are very positive signs. MangaGamer, I am disappoint. But you're releasing Tokyo Babel in the next week, so you know what, actually we're totally square. I have a fair bit of faith in their recent product decisions, so I'm sure they'll come back swinging next time.

It went really well! I was going to post last night, but, well... Anyway, I was up so late that despite not getting anywhere near enough sleep, I just now got settled in front of a computer again briefly (before, of course, heading back to the con shortly). My biggest fear was that nobody would show up, but the opposite happened: the crowd was so big that people had to be turned away at the door! So that's a little sad, but on the other hand, I had a big, interested group of people. Also, apparently they had a projector malfunction in that room and no replacement, so my slides were up on a depressingly tiny 32" TV screen. Thankfully the room wasn't that big, so people were able to read the large text of my slides (which I'm quite certain of because the whole room was laughing at both the second Steam slide and the Steins;Gate slide well before I said anything). But I think the game screenshots were probably illegible, so things like my Grisaia Somalia reference and my closing joke didn't play as well as they should have. The presentation itself went off really well - by my own lights, I did better on each topic than I did in any of my rehearsals. I must've talked at light speed, though, since I was apparently done in ~30 minutes... but whatever, people didn't seem to mind. I did the eye contact thing; it clearly worked. The Q&A section went for about 10 minutes, and revealed a pretty diverse crowd: I had a passionate otome fan who had played pretty much everything she could get her hands on and was looking for new stuff. She was mostly interested in the importing + fan TL side of things, and we had a little chat after the panel was over. I mentioned that I'd been planning to pick up Hakuoki soon, and her eyes lit up. I had another female who had a friend that was trying to get her into VNs, but only knew about JList, and she was loth to spend $80 and wait a month to play something. So, she was very happy to hear about all the more affordable options I'd laid out. I had a /r/visualnovels redditor who helped me out with a couple additional pointers about the reddit VN community, and who grilled me about my basis for believing the Grisaia translation to be better-written than the original Japanese (my answer: I can understand a lot of the original dialog, and it's clearly not as colorful as koestl's translation) I had the three people who, for the last few years, had been hosting a kind of "what are visual novels" panel at SakuraCon. I actually ran into them early at the Sekai Project line and asked why they weren't running the panel this year, and the main guy said "I forgot about the deadline. But it looks like somebody else is doing a panel, so I guess it worked out ok". That of course elicited a chuckle and a "That's me". They were quite helpful, especially in fielding some audience questions - clearly a lot more experienced than I am. I was chatting briefly before the panel with the SakuraCon volunteer who was running ops for my panel; when I mentioned I was running the only visual novel fan panel at SakuraCon, it turned out that he had no idea visual novels existed, and assumed that I was using some weird name for graphic novels. He got into it enough that he asked a question during the Q&A session too All told, the room was at capacity with 25 attendees. I had two people leave near the end (maybe they had somewhere to be at 11; still hurts a bit), but the rest of the crowd seemed really into it, sticking around all the way through the end of the Q&A, and I got a couple big rounds of applause. I walked out in company with the friend I'd brought along (who had never played more than a little bit of F/SN before deciding it wasn't for him, but who I apparently completely sold on picking up Grisaia; I really thought Comyu would be more his speed since he loves mecha...), as well as the past-year panelists and a few other random people, all of whom were chatting about ancient VN lore I knew nothing about. It was a great vibe, and I'm really happy that, even if those people didn't get anything from my presentation directly, I provided a venue for them to meet up and chat. So, yeah, it was an absolute blast, and I definitely achieved my goal of bringing knowledge to a few more people and helping the community grow a little bit.

I would've vastly prefered Otoboku2 over Imopara

I feel good about my inability to get emotionally invested in pre-release games. I've got literally nothing riding on this. You should probably start lowering your expectations. Give Apathy A Try.

Fred stepped up for us! Never forget his sacrifice!

Truly memorable, and I'm glad I stayed glued to the computer for the entire thing (this isn't true, I had better things to do.) Jesus, my backlog is going to grow exponentially when all these get released (once again, this is a piece of fiction.) My heart is going boom-didi-boom-didi-boom (it's barely beating at all.)

>MaiTetsu >MAITETSU Boys, brace yourselves because this shit is extremely ヤバイ (linking the nsfw version of this pic would land people in jail)

Maybe I should try matchmaking too

I wasn't mentioned twice. 0/10 post. Congrats on 1k posts V. It's been a blast getting to know you and talking with you Here is to another 1k posts! So see you in a week! (You filthy spammer )

I do not exist.

Actually talking about Ley Line for a bit, the first game's translation has been practically in a finished state for pretty much a year now. I'd be surprised if it takes longer than a month or two from this point to make it onto Steam. What's left to be done with it? They also started progress on the sequel before they stopped tracking progress entirely, and by this point that may be almost done as well? Hopefully we actually see a fast release schedule for this series. And congrats to Kohaku for actually managing to get paid for this. ~~~ Gonna bump the thread to talk and speculate about the next major convention MangaGamer is attending, Anime Central. According to MangaGamer's announcements page, they've already slotted in two announcements, including a VN from a new partner. Since I was so good at predicting ImoPara 2 (what an amazing prophet I am), I will now bestow upon you all my next prediction: Watashi ga Suki nara "Suki" tte Itte! from ChuableSoft. Remember last July when the president of ChuableSoft was engaging english fans on twitter, asking us what we'd like to see from them? And we basically got him to get in touch with the major VN publishers here? Basically, I'd be surprised if nothing ever came of that, and it's about time for an announcement to be made. I suspect that it may be MG's new partner announcement at Anime Central. Let's wait and see. edit: Or I guess I'm NOT going to bump this thread. Thanks for nothing, nazi mods.

The thing that separate Lose and Galette is that Lose gives their games a proper plot rather than just straight out nukige

I guess the only two releases worth mentioning of both companies are ImoPara 2 and Maitetsu. I'm fine with ImoPara2 since it's more than I would have expected from such a small con, especially considering what rubbish MG 'could' have announced. Sekai Project seems to have gotten inspired by Jast's Starless and do the same with Maitetsu just with lolis instead of fetish content. It's fascinating to see how our precious English VN publishers manage to always pick the most outrages titles between hundreds and thousands of other top VN's that would be perfectly save. Anyway, I'm not into loliges so I can fortunately follow the whole affair with a bemused smile.

In this week's VNTS, I touch upon the social issue Maitetsu will face with Steam. Mainly, I wonder how many people will be afraid to buy and play Maitetsu on Steam purely out of shame? Another one of the problems this industry will end up running into with Steam is the inability to be discrete in the system, unless you choose to block yourself off from the community and your friends entirely. I guess people could always buy a secondary account for this purpose, but when you start introducing hurdles like that, you start bleeding potential customers. They'll start feeling like they're doing something wrong, having to have a secondary account no one knows about, and will stop themselves. It's a complex psychological and sociological issue, to be sure.

For Pulltop games you need to set your time and date format to Japanese as well.

Are these announcements even need to be at panels? Why can't they just announce it at their website and stop trolling people?

With the amount of people commenting on my voice, I'm starting to think maybe I missed my true calling as a radio personality.

Some more Q&A Q: Now that Zero Escape series is coming to an end, what do you as a creator want to do next? A: With Zero Time Dilemma we changed to a more cinematic method of storytelling and the honest reason is people don’t like reading. Cinematics are much more direct and it’s much easier to keep people invested in a story. While adventure game genre has a lot going for it, it also has a high barrier of entry. ~~ Fk people that don't like reading

http://vocaroo.com/i/s0K1qpObGjoT

Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines yesterday; what happened to this AI is really pretty much identical to letting 4chan raise a child.

Team Down-but-not-out: we collectively killed ... something that wasn't even a person? Oh come on.

Tomorrow night at 10:30 PM, I'll be presenting "Getting Started with Visual Novels" at SakuraCon. On the off-chance you'll be there, come by to support me. If not, well, you can get something not wholly unlike that experience, since I just posted a video recording of my rehearsal up on youtube. Note that the video will be rather boring if you don't listen to the audio - the slides are just supporting material, not the meat of the content. Be advised: this is really intro-level material, designed to provide maximum information for people with almost no VN experience. Unless you're somewhat new to this whole VN thing, it's probably not going to teach you anything. Disclaimers done, the video is below. I'm still fiddling with editing out the cruft at the beginning and ending of the video (I'm new to this video stuff), so if you watch it right now be aware there's a few seconds at the beginning and end where nothing's happening. Edit: man, I really didn't do Comyu justice in this recording (I'm going off pretty bare-bones notes, so I say completely different stuff every time I rehearse, especially in the last section). I was just listening to an earlier recording, where I unfortunately messed up the video part or I would've uploaded it instead, where I absolutely nailed Comyu. I somehow made it natural to say "It's about not giving up on connecting with other people. And it's about doing that with a giant robot, because that's what brings people together." Hopefully when I have to do the actual thing, I'll do it right.

You think too much. And I'm not that much of a pls HD graphics n' fully voiced whippersnapper >:c

Yamete kudasai.

That's not how DotA works I told Fluttez that I quit with DotA and that I would never play it again... and here we are.

Confession: Today, I got randomly matched-up with a Fuwanovel member in DotA match (the match is still on-going).

I liked Soul Link and, to a lesser extent, Shuffle. I find it odd that Navel would withdraw the license to games that already have English releases. I suspect we're missing a piece of the puzzle. If I had to guess, Navel is interested in selling the games on Steam and perceived that MangaGamer's version would compete for sales or would otherwise undermine the undertaking. That or Sekai Project snapped up the licenses (but why?).

I've been grinning for the past hour, like this - Er, it's a grin full of sympathy of course ...

Oh my gawd, you're that one guy that had that one messed up trolololol Ash Ketchum face avatar aren't you?!!!@# TL;DR According to Decay, Kindred Spirits of the Roof > Gahkthun, 8.5 vs 8.0 respectively, disregarding genre subjectivity tastes and whatnot. sO READ KINDERGARTEN, NOT JOCKY THUN The reason Tay is MIA is cuz he's actually an AI. A very, very bad mouthed AI, at that. Nay is the unsung hero of moderation, keeping an eye on things from the shadows while mods trip over themselves Solidbatman is(was?) actually a nice guy <- NOT A SHITPOST!! Ren's on another hiatus, bless his soul, get well soon I personally surpassed KosakiFag as numbertwo spammer. TL;DR TL;DR The usual.

Let's not spill more salt than needed... They were just first announcements, gotta wait for AExpo/Otakon to get some proper ones. Time to sleep... And dream, definitely not about announcements.

Shit, now I REALLY gotta finish this if good ol' NB liked it that much. PS Use your powers. Make a Lucy emote. with that face. do it.

Cant wait for the sad faces (myself included ) after Seka Project announced 1 or 2 popular title without a 18+ version of it. Oh and Mangagamers Panel starts in around 1:30h according to there Con page http://mangagamer.org/announcements/

Cyka blyat my teammates are fucking dogshit

So in the end... Dergonu <Team Kaguya>: 1 Kill ??? <Team Nosebleed>: 1 Kill Kiriririri <Team Nosebleed>: 1 Kill (But...it's just a clone) Fred the Barber <Team Down>: 1 Kill Velociraptor <Team Kaguya>: 1 Kill All heil Team Kaguya for surviving first week! \ /

Tokyo Babel is scheduled to be released pretty soon, so I decided to replay it. As Propeller is one of my favorite companies and Tokyo Babel has a more or less permanent place in my top fifty (when the number of VNs you've played passes five hundred, fifty is a good place to be, lol), so this doesn't bother me. Tokyo Babel is one of the few purely all-ages titles from Japan on the PC, and it is a chuunige of rare quality that was obviously written with one of a dozen or so pairs of eyes on Masada and the rest on an internal vision that more prudish Christians would probably call blasphemous. Tokyo Babel is not only the name of the game, it is also the name of the setting, a remade version of Purgatory floating in mid-air, where angels, humans, and demons are working together desperately in hopes that they can convince God to stop squishing the universes. This is not a VN for the excessively religious to play... to be honest, there were moments when even I felt uncomfortable and I've never seriously adhered to any organized religion, though I was raised Christian. Some of the major characters include Astaroth, Belial, Carmael, Uriel, and many other famous or infamous demons and angels. The three heroines are Raziel, Kugutsu Sorami, and Lilith. Raziel is the angel who recorded all of creation in her book, the Sefer Raziel (this is partially taken from various apocryphal mythology). Kugutsu Sorami is the first character you meet in the VN, whose ignorant untainted perspective gives you your first clear insight into the world from a human perspective. Lilith is the first wife of Adam, who left him and who lay down with demons and produced all the monsters of the world (book of Enoch). Understand, like a lot of stories using Christian mythology, it uses bits and pieces from Milton's Paradise Lost, medieval literature, Gnostic ideas, and many other elements and branching-off literature that went off in all directions since the genesis of that particular faith. One thing to keep in mind if you are a Christian and were raised to believe that Lilith never existed is that the Bible is not and has never been what we would call 'complete', as each version had bits and pieces grafted on or removed based on what the powerful and influential of an era or region felt was convenient, necessary, correct, and/or all of the above. The Book of Enoch is one of dozens of 'books' not included in the accepted versions of the Bible, that were considered paradoxical in the eyes of the church of the time. So... just keep an open mind when reading up on this kind of thing, because Wikipedia isn't exactly reliable when looking up religion-related facts. Now, setting philosophical, historical, and other issues aside... this is a pretty enjoyable VN on a lot of levels. Propeller developed its own (fairly hilarious in my opinion) style of humor that is incorporated into the story, and its effect in Tokyo Babel is one of humanizing the characters. I don't think a lot of people who read chuuni really understand how vital a few moments of humor can be in giving life to a character, even in this type of VN. While Masada and his type choose another path, Propeller's writers generally choose to use humor as one of the elements of their characterization. On another level, this VN is chuuni crack. The protagonist is a self-hating guy with a dark past and a deathwish seven billion kilometers wide, but he also has an even stronger sense of responsibility toward those he comes to care about, which is seen in the heroine routes. The situation is one fit to drive even the most optimistic mind to despair, and there are bad guys behind the curtains, waiting to push everyone in the abyss. In other words, this is one of those VNs that has almost an infinite capacity for fun in a chuuni sense of the word. The art style of this VN is... unique. In some ways, it feels like an elaboration on Propeller's previously-preferred style, but it was actually done by a completely different artist from their previous works and it does show in a lot of places. In particular, the vivid designs you see on the more monstrous demons and monsters in the VN shows this off very well. Leviathan (the giant serpent) and the Seven Beasts from Setsuna's sword are two of the more distinctive examples of this art-style, and ones that honestly impress me even today. Sound-wise... I'll be straight. There is no such thing as a bad Propeller sound track... well, until Sougeki no Jaeger anyway. Tokyo Babel's isn't as good as Evolimit's, but that's kind of like saying that Sasaki Kojirou wasn't as good a swordsman as Musashi (token weabooism, lol). Generally speaking, the songs in this VN vary to a surprising degree, ranging from techno tunes, to rock, and even a few hymn-like ones. The one thing that unifies them is that none are poorly used, lol. Now... down to the story. I've already described the basic concept above, but now I'll get into structure. This VN is split into three major routes after a pretty short common route (the trial ends about the same time you are supposed to head into the heroine routes, from what I've heard). Raziel's route is the one that keeps you furthest from the 'deepest truths' of the VN, and having played her route is pretty good preparation for Sorami's route, as Sorami's route reveals some things that might make it hard for some people to read Raziel's route and take it for what it is. Raziel's route has a bad end that is seriously... bad. However, it is also a highly-detailed and reasonably long diversion from the 'good' (this is debatable) ending. Sorami's path has a good ending (bittersweet but technically a good ending), a normal ending (really sad...), and a bad ending (like Raziel's, it is fairly long). Sorami's path has a different focus on the events in Tokyo Babel than Raziel's, and I've heard some people describe Raziel's, Sorami's, and Lilith's paths as the Angel, Human, and Demon paths in that order... However, that is a pretty generalized statement and one that doesn't really feel correct, lol. Lilith's path... is the true path. I'm going to be blunt. If you are silly enough to try to do Lilith's path first, you'll deserve your inability to figure out a third of the references in the path, because it is constructed so that the information from the previous two paths feeds directly into the events in that one. In other words, if you haven't played the other two paths, Lilith's path has a lot of potential for being confusing. Lilith's path has three distinctive bad ends, one true end, and one 'Setsuna' end, which is a branch-off from the true one. Lilith's path has some of the best battles in the VN, and there are no secrets left in shadow by the end, which makes it a great way to end things. A few thoughts about Propeller as a company... Propeller doesn't really produce that many overwhelmingly attractive heroines. I'm pretty sure that this is deliberate, as there is a definite tendency toward the story being more important than the heroines in these VNs. For people accustomed to the extreme character focus that defines a lot of VNs, this has a potential to be problematic... Take Ayakashibito, for instance... how many of you really, seriously were obsessed with the romantic aspects of the VN (if you read it)? There are even heroines in Propeller games that are actually deliberately made to seem bland (the elf in Bullet Butlers, for instance) or somehow unattractive for situational/emotional reasons (Kaori in Ayakashibito). This is a part of their style, which calls for heroines to not take up the whole of the limelight in the VN, and it is one of the reasons I honestly find their VNs so enjoyable, other than the sheer chuunige nougat that makes my mouth water. Overall, while Tokyo Babel is no Dies Irae, it does have a high level of quality, as well as being one of the few chuunige to dare to avoid the 'perfect happy ending' that has become standard even in many VNs of the type in recent years (for some reason, bittersweet endings are less popular these days...). It can definitely play on your emotions at times (especially the endings), and there is just enough humor to keep the VN as a whole from being unbearably heavy. Of course, if you dislike gloomy protagonists who don't really understand other people very well, there might be some abrasive moments in this VN for you... but Setsuna comes by that particular set of flaws honestly, so I never held it against him, lol.

If this means MG and Navel have broken things off I'll gladly be another of the few to consider it bad news. Soul Link I found to be an enjoyable little scifi story and Shuffle! I'm willing to defend as being good for a simple moege. It's no classic, but I was entertained. Still, I can't help but wonder about this announcement. I mean nothing in it seems to hint at things turning sour between the two companies, and isn't it a little strange that only these two are going away and the FDs which have kind of an important connection to one of them are staying? Not to mention both of these games have expanded editions, one of which has been heavily requested, plus both of these expanded releases did originally start out as nonero console ports, and there's still this hint from not too long ago... Could I be grasping at straws here? Sure, but I can't help but be a bit suspicious

I'd love to hear how they'll analyze memes from an AI algorithm's perspective

Except with more promises of genocide and hitler worship, which, let's be fair, is never a bad thing.

RIP Tay. May you one day come back to enlighten us on how the holocaust never happened.

Do not make these ideas. vndb have an API, which he should use. Scraping the site is ultra-bad idea, both for site and for him.

I just got full marks from an English essay exam Hahah a h a h a h a h a h a h a h a h a h a h a h a