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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.

I should have done this earlier while the hype for the game was still going on but better late than never right? I hope this review will shed some more light on what this game is actually about because I think it deserves more attention. You can read this whole review without fearing any important spoilers will be revealed. If anybody wants to discuss or ask about specific spoilers, they are free to do so as long as they use a spoiler tag. Lucy -The Eternity She Wished For- is a remake of a 2010 Korean visual novel that is the result of a Kickstarter project started by M-Vizlab. The project attempted to translate the original game in both Japanese and English as well as rewrite the story and remake the art assets in order to deliver the most polished version possible. The campaign successfully reached its goal and went on to raise a total of 18,155 CAD, meaning several of the stretch goals were reached, one of which included full voice acting in both Japanese and Korean for the main character, Lucy Valentine. About a year later, the game is finally released on both Playism and Steam for users worldwide to enjoy. I have to admit I was very excited when this title was initially announced. Not only because it would be the first Korean visual novel I would get to experience, but also because I have read several Korean web comics and I know just how different and engaging fictional stories created in Korea can get. Does this mean I am a little biased? I wouldn’t deny that, but I did not really set any expectations for what the game was going to be about, so I like to believe my first play through of it was as unbiased as possible and that’s what I’ll try to carry over to the people reading this. The story starts off with you. Yes, “you”, the protagonist. From the get go the game sets itself up for self-insertion by having an unnamed protagonist with the name tag “You”. This is a very curious choice given the events that unfold later, but I guess the creator thought having a self-insert protagonist was his vision for the story, and I have to say that despite my personal disdain for these types of protagonist, this one didn’t really impact my overall enjoyment, especially given that the game is set up so that the characters would never really need to call you by your given name so very rarely does cognitive dissonance kick in. The only problem, and this is a general problem with these types of protagonists, is that the choices they make while carrying “your” name might not actually be the choices you would make, and that may break some of the immersion, but again I think the story handles this fairly well and most people will hardly notice it. So who are “you”? You are a regular student going on about your life in a technologically advanced world where owning an android at home is an everyday thing. The only caveat is that you hate androids in general, and so does the family you live with. While not much is given to the reader about the protagonist, the game does make it clear that they do not like robots, and this is what sets the tone for most of the game and the future interactions you will see. One day, while going home, you decide to drop by the local junkyard, and that’s where you encounter a fallen android amidst all the scrap metal. This android is more realistic than any other you’ve seen and you wonder why it’s even there to be destroyed. Against what you previously said about disliking androids, you decide to take this one home, perhaps due to a sense of pity, but regardless, it’s now your responsibility. And this is when we’re introduced to the main heroine of the game. Although it might seem unreasonable for a character that’s set themselves up as an android hater to take an android home, I think the protagonist’s inconsistent morals are what later make these moments make some sense, so even though I was initially questioning it, I later became to understand some of the reasoning behind it. (Could anyone really ignore this!?) After several comical attempts at talking with the android, you discover she’s named Lucy Valentine and that she’s a multi-purpose android that can essentially do all kind of house work. However, some of her parts are severely damaged and she is unable to move. The following day you take her to the repair shop and drop her off there while you go to school. In school we’re introduced to yet another character, and the protagonist’s supposed best friend, Gears. Gears is an android fanatic and owns several of them at home and he is an incredible contrast to the protagonist, which makes you wonder how they became friends in the first place. Although they might initially come off as the comedic relief character, Gears actually represents one view of the world, the side that wholeheartedly accepts androids. Once school is over, you drop by the repair shop where you’re greeted by Lucy, who’s now fully recovered and jumping around, excited for your return. She calls you “master”, and despite your attempts at making her call you something else (the game actually prompts you to type a name you want), she ends up not believing that’s your name (in my opinion, “Onii-chan” is a wonderful name) and continues calling you “master” anyway. After chatting some more with Lucy and getting familiarized with her new personality, you arrive home, only to encounter your father in the living room. Similar to the protagonist, the father is unnamed and is always referred to as “father” by both the protagonist and Lucy. Much like Gears, the father character represents another viewpoint of the world, one that despises androids and their existence. The father is very adamant when he sees Lucy and thinks she is a worthless robot that could never replace a human being. Despite this though, you convince him to let Lucy stay, so long as you don’t let her affect your grades and you take responsibility for her. After this, the main journey of the game begins. Although I didn’t initially think about it, the game clearly attempts to set the protagonist as someone who lives in between this android hate/love dichotomy, a dichotomy represented by two characters the protagonist interacts with on a daily basis and that Lucy comes to disrupt, and this is essentially the central theme of the game and what most of the story that follows centers around. Most of the main story deals with interactions between the protagonist and Lucy and their relationship. When I say “relationship” I don’t mean a romantic relationship. Yes, that’s right, this game does not center around (or have, for that matter) romance, which is actually something I quite appreciated. Yes, they could have gone for some human x robot romantic plot, but they decided to keep it more grounded in reality and in the setting the story takes place in and focus on other key aspects of human and robot relationships, mainly whether or not an android can fill the same kind of roles a human does in terms of emotions and feelings. The tone of the story is set up very nicely and subtly without going overboard. I never once felt like things were being rushed, even though there was never really any noticeable filler. Each scene is important and reveals something, and even if it’s not related to the actual plot it’s a scene revolving around the connections between the characters, which I truly appreciated seeing. If you think the whole thing is a drama fest though, I'd like to inform you there's plenty of nice comedic relief moments you will witness throughout the day, most of which revolving around Lucy's social awkwardness, and I don't mean to say that she is shy, but rather the complete opposite. (I wish I could look this happy doing the laundry too ) The story also touches upon the dichotomy I mentioned earlier, by having the protagonist make several choices that either lean him towards one side or the other and are also the main causes of both his internal and external (primarily with his father) conflicts. Apart from that, the perspective shifts multiple times, primarily to the perspective of some doctor you don’t really know who seems to be in charge of Lucy before she met you. Not much is told in these moments other than what seems to be the backstory of Lucy when she was still in her development stages. Going any further than this on the story would make me reveal important scenes and plot points, but I think the general outline I gave is more than enough to explain what the game’s main themes and atmosphere are like. The story spans across a total of about 4 hours, the first hour of which I roughly covered before. As far as branching plots go, I was somewhat disappointed with the game. None of the choices apart from the last one actually matter, and the last choice merely has two options, meaning the game really only has two main endings. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly fine if a visual novel doesn’t even have branching paths, but for a title that seemed to have so many interesting choices to make during its main story, it sure lacked when it came to those choices affecting the outcome. The choices are primarily used in the end game to collect achievements or for pure comedic effects. In terms of characters, the game naturally spends a great deal of time around Lucy and her antics, leaving the rest of the characters as more of a background noise than anything. Lucy is an extremely cheerful girl who I think is very likeable by anyone. Although some people dislike overly cheerful characters, Lucy’s personality does not feel too over the top but rather purely human, with her primary goals being making the protagonist have a happy and easier life. She tries her best every day to do the house chores when her master is not around and she tries to prove herself to his father constantly in hopes that she will be acknowledged. I found myself in love with Lucy pretty quickly and I think that anyone who initially does as well will likely have a great time during most of the story. (You either love that smile or you're literally Hitler) The other character that has a lot of relevance in the protagonist’s daily activities is his father, who’s the main source of all the conflicts in the story and who seems to be really abusive towards his son. It’s somewhat hard to comprehend his actions, even when the game later on somewhat tries to explain itself. In fact, I was genuinely concerned for the protagonist’s safety in his household, but maybe that was the intention as well. Lastly, Gears is mostly only present when the protagonist is confused and needs someone to consult. As I mentioned, Gears loves androids and is very knowledgeable on them, so he becomes the protagonist’s number one choice for getting information on Lucy. He’s also like I said a representation of a viewpoint that loves androids, and he opens up the protagonist to the idea that androids aren’t actually all that bad. The protagonist himself also managed to have some relevance, even if he doesn’t have a name, as he’s the one caught up in this divided world where he doesn’t know whether he should like or hate androids and he’s constantly questioning whether or not what he’s doing is the right thing. Personally I find that this is the most engaging aspect of the story and what kept me wondering if he will succumb to his father’s hatred for androids or if he will become independent and do his own thing. Ultimately, as the main focus of the game, the characters managed to bring out the main themes pretty well and they did often make me question whether or not I was going on the right path. Their interactions are all relevant, none of them feel like filler, and that was probably the most enjoyable part to witness. After you complete the game, there’s multiple achievements to unlock, some of which include extra side stories that attempt to explain certain events in the story. The game really makes sure you take the most out of it and if you missed certain things in your first play through you’ll have to go back and replay it to get the achievements. Moving on to the more technical side of things, the art is another great selling point for this title. As I mentioned in the beginning all the art assets were remade using the Kickstarter funds and boy did they pull it off. For such a short game, the developers understood when to have a CG to capture the moment and I think there isn’t a single important moment I could point to that does not have its own CG. The character sprites are lively and have several different expressions that properly convey their emotions, Lucy being the one with the most attention to detail, honestly almost every single CG with her in it was incredibly heartwarming to look at. Whoever was in charge of this game’s art design really nailed it. (Look at that face. LOOK. AT. THAT. FACE.) In terms of sound, the game does not have a lot of variety to offer, but what it does offer fits perfectly. Outside of the background music itself, which I actually really enjoyed listening to, the game has plenty of sound effects that it utilizes to bring the most out of the scenes. Ironically, the thing I remember the most about the sound is the menu music. I think it’s the first time a song has stuck in my head so much. The voice acting was fairly good. I played the game in Japanese since that’s the language I’m more familiar with and the voice actress did a wonderful job as far as carrying Lucy’s bubbly personality goes. I did attempt to play the game with Korean voice acting but unfortunately it sounded too strange for me to find it enjoyable. I don’t want to comment on whether the Korean voice acting was good or bad since I have almost zero knowledge on the language, but this time I preferred playing the game with what I was familiar with. You can also not play with voices if either of the two bother you. Lastly, on the writing front, the English is a bit stiff. I can't comment on the translation since I don't know anything about Korean, but overall a lot of the sentences feel a tad bit unnatural, not so much that you're questioning the nationality of the characters speaking, but enough to be noticable by those who really value that kind of stuff. Also Lucy speaks in 3rd person. Take that last part as you will, I personally am not a fan of the 3rd person speech in English but at the very least it was applied consistently and if you take into account that Lucy is a robot, maybe you can cut the game some slack for making this choice. In the end, Lucy is a game about building bonds and fixing bridges between characters as well as tackle the issues that a world with hyper realistic androids could bring to a society. Does it deal with a lot of morals and science? Not exactly. I think the story is more about the protagonist and his journey to coming to terms with himself and androids, it’s just that it so happens to have a nice side message on top of being a heartwarming tale. If you want a small yet impactful story about a human and his android, I think Lucy will certainly fit the bill, especially given its price tag. As for me, it was a journey I don’t regret taking or paying for and I hope more people who finish the game feel the same way as well. I found myself completely absorbed in it after a while and I was even caught off guard by the game multiple times, which if I were to elaborate on would completely spoil the story, so do yourself a favor and go try it for yourself. Final rating: 69/69 go read the actual review. If you want to pick it up, the game is available DRM-free for $9.99 on Playism as well as on Steam. The Playism version also comes with a free Steam Key.

Congratulations Master V! It's true we have the best group of Spammers. I mean people! It's been great fun (#NoRegrets) and here's to 1k more I'm not one of the ones who spam too much luckily! (anyone who claims otherwise shall be sued for difamation and falsely accusing me) Anyways, Congratulations again Master, even if you threaten too much for no reason I still love you (no homo)

Fk, now I really, REALLY, REALLY gotta read Kindred Spirits if Tiago himself is putting in a good word #ikkikoi is awesome. As much as people tend to hate multiple viewpoints of repeated scenes, I'm a sucker for them, which was why I liked Symph Rain's mid-late game so much. ~~ The plan is to finish Lucy by this weekend, then Kindred throughout SpringBreak n' Partyhartying.

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

I don't think so, I think they're just both busy with real life, though of course I'm not privy to the details of their lives.

omg, that's so true, what the hell happened to our favorite Rain x Cyr Cyr last log was Feb 23, RIP, prob busy w. the 3D world and Rains is actually still active 'round the forums, so it just means he ditched this thread too-cool-4-you-scrubs style

3) In Japan sending messages through the internet is pretty much a standard. Apps like LINE are really big in Japan. Their mobile data plans are amazing, that's why you see them sending e-mails instead of regular texts in anime. Yes, regular text messages exist, but they prefer using mobile data since you can do a lot more with it. 4) No, that's not how Japanese people are, I don't know what gave you that idea. They're normal human beings that can give affection like everyone else. Public displays of affection might be less frequent, but things like hugs and the like aren't some strange concept. Also, being patted on the head isn't looking down on someone, I don't know where you learned that, but it's a sign of affection in many places. It's usually only done to small children though. I think you're extrapolating what characters do in VNs into what Japanese people do in real life. Here's a valuable lesson: don't assume Japanese people behave the way their games portray them. Games are fictional, they're full of idealistic tropes, and you should not assume real life works like that.

Well the whole thing was disappointing to say the least. As far as Maitetsu goes, I really don't see the reason to license a title they know is controversial only to remove the majority of it's content. While I didn't really have much plans for Maitetsu before, I absolutely deplore removal of content to give a half-assed product. Then there's Sakura Manga ........

I'm reading Maitetsu at the moment. I can comment about it later.

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.

Holy Crap Maitetsu?!!!!!

I heard that the last season of dxd deviated more from the LNs annoying fans, but I really enjoyed it anyway, and I hear they're planning an OVA to put the story "back on track" to be in alignment with the LNs. Either way it's still a good fun watch, especially if you haven't read the LNs first.

I talked briefly with both the MangaGamer and Sekai Project booth staff today, and managed to get one interesting tidbit out of a MG person: when I asked about a Gahkthun physical release, he said "not yet", with a very strong emphasis on the yet. So, it seems like that's being worked on. They had a bit of Gahkthun merch hanging around - a towel featuring the Neon swimsuit CG was admittedly somewhat tantalizing, but is nonetheless not my thing. However, I couldn't resist picking up the Gahkthun drama CD they were selling; my spoken Japanese comprehension is getting good enough to where I should be able to get something out of it. Seriously, though, I am getting really annoyed with MG's marketing. First, they bring in a sweet romance title like Kindred Spirits on the Roof. Then, on the marketing side they take this sweet romance story and spin it as pure sex: "#yuritopia" was about all they ever posted about it on Twitter. So I ask the booth staffer about it today in an open-ended way, leading with "I hear that's pretty good". I even had the decency to tell them beforehand that I really like Gahtkhun and am not interested much in their nukige, hoping for just a small nod towards quality story/writing/whatever. The MG booth staffer's response: "Yeah, it's got gay ghosts!" He then tries to sell it to a few random passers-by, yelling "lesbian ghosts!" No takers. Shocking. Anyway, just a couple more hours until the SakuraCon Sekai Project panel now. I'm curious if they're going to dump all the announcements here, or if they'll split with Anime Boston tomorrow; if they split, I expect they'll save their best one for the second day, so it's entirely likely we'll just get 3x random doujin or something tonight. We'll know soon enough, I guess.

Thanks for the support and the suggestions, folks. My presentation is in 9 hours - starting to get a little jittery, but I'm sure it'll be fine. I actually intended to do things in that order initially, but I've been reading books about presentations, and some points they made convinced me that I needed to move things around. The psychology is basically that you need to start off strong, and then end even stronger. In an informational presentation like this, it's ok for the middle to be a little bit slower, but the ending is what people are going to remember the most, so you really need to save your strongest moments for the wrap-up. Probably the online video is a pretty different beast vs. the in-person presentation, in two big ways: Viewers are less invested in the online video than the people at the panel will be, since it's just a youtube video and they're comfortably at home; they can click away at any time. If you're there in person, as long as I hook you enough at the beginning and keep the pace reasonable, you're not going to get up and leave on me. In the live presentation format, I'm going to be visible, and people like looking at people rather than words (which is why my slides have so little text) - so a lot hinges on my attitude. Like Ageha said in KonoSora, you can control people with your eyes. So, I'm going to be trying to make good eye contact and whatnot to try to keep people engaged, and then finish strong to get people really hooked on the idea.

You know what this feels like? Winning!

I have an odd feeling that this is actually a real person having the time of his life trolling the shit out of everyone...

I always thought japan had it's own thing called WcDonald's.

Currently playing Kindred Spirits on the Roof. I really like how the "protagonist" Yuna feels really cool, even without trying. How would I explain it...? Whereas other cool characters usually feel like they are pretending or forcing it, she doesn't because she is neither pretending nor forcing it most of the time - she panics and acts embarrassed as much as the next girl, but she still manages to be cool the rest of the time. All of her CG's look cool and that helps immensely. Another thing I like about her is how she fills the usual holes that characters leave in conversation. Let's imagine a normal conversation where a character says something that doesn't make complete sense and makes me think to myself about how it doesn't make sense. Yuna, however, always seems to point out what I'm thinking when she thinks to herself. Maybe a character makes an argument with a hole for the sake of persuasion - Yuna doesn't let it slide.

Confession: I got a (female) friend of mine to try KS today she likes it It was a good day