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Well I feel that I should have hit the 1000 mark on the 16th so that my second anniversary of joining Fuwa would have coincided. Though having taken 2 years to cross the 1000th post mark is pretty slow. The time I spent in browsing the net per day is generally 1-2 hours which is isn't too long. I normally spend around an hour here on Fuwa daily. That combined with me being a somewhat of a lurker and really lazy accounts for my comparatively meager post count. I realize that not many people know much about me and even I haven't really participated in a lot of the threads so it's kinda understandable. For me Fuwa is the first forum where I actually lasted more than a month and before I had never really been using forums at all. Staying in Fuwa was certainly a great experience for me with it's spectacular community. Since I wanted to keep it short and sweet this is all I'll say. I truly thank every member of Fuwanovel for making it such a great place.

No actually, they shouldn't. Ever. A review is a summary of a person's experiences of that game filtered through their own preconceptions, preferences, and biases. Get used to that fact, because that's how they've always been, that's how they are presently, and that's how they always will be. And that's why I watched 2 film critics give the exact same film 1/5 and 4/5 respectively the other day.

It was announced on their Facebook aswell as the Crunchyroll site itself that they finally had formed an alliance that would give CR the exclusive worldwide digital distribution rights (not counting Asia) of Kadokawa's upcoming titles this year. Here's what the press release said: Crunchyroll and KADOKAWA Enter into Strategic Alliance SAN FRANCISCO/TOKYO – Apr. 11, 2016 – Major anime streaming platform Crunchyroll, Inc. and major Japanese publisher KADOKAWA Corporation announced today the formation of a strategic alliance that will give Crunchyroll exclusive worldwide digital distribution rights (excluding Asia) for KADOKAWA anime titles in the upcoming year. The partnership will also involve a marketing collaboration between Crunchyroll and KADOKAWA’s publishing business in North America, among others. Crunchyroll is the largest digital distribution platform in North America specializing in anime and other Japanese content, offering simultaneous subtitled distribution of Japanese anime and other content in 8 languages to its more than 20 million users worldwide (excluding Asia). The company’s majority investor is Otter Media, a venture formed with AT&T and The Chernin Group. The strategic alliance between Crunchyroll and KADOKAWA involves, among other initiatives, (i) KADOKAWA’s licensing to Crunchyroll exclusive rights for the worldwide distribution (excluding Asia) for KADOKAWA’s slate of upcoming anime titles for the upcoming year, (ii) co-financing by Crunchyroll in KADOKAWA’s anime titles to be produced in the future and (iii) comprehensive marketing collaboration between KADOKAWA’s publishing business and Crunchyroll’s distribution platform business. Both parties regard the alliance as an important first step towards possibly further expanding relations in the future. To bolster KADOKAWA’s planned formation of a publishing joint venture with the major U.S. publisher Hachette Book Group, specializing in manga and light novels (scheduled for May), Crunchyroll and KADOKAWA will seek to strengthen their relationship through a marketing campaign with the book publishing and anime distribution businesses, as well as joint efforts to expand relevant merchandising businesses, in order to maximize the growth potential of Japanese content in the North American market. Masaki Matsubara, Representative Director and President of KADOKAWA said, “With their membership steadily increasing every year, Crunchyroll has established its firm position as the largest digital distribution platform specializing in Japanese content. Meanwhile, visitors at anime and pop culture events held in North America continue to rise year by year, demonstrating the increased popularity of Japanese content in the market. KADOKAWA considers the North American market as the most important international market for the company alongside the Greater China and Southeast Asian market where we have an existing business presence, and therefore look forward to our strategic alliance with Crunchyroll to secure an effective marketing collaboration system with our publishing business in the North American market, as well as contribute to the global growth of Japanese cool content as a whole, not limited to KADOKAWA.” Kun Gao, GM of Crunchyroll, said, “The hunger for compelling anime, manga and light novel content is growing at an astounding rate throughout the world, and KADOKAWA has always been at the forefront of creating that content. We look forward to working closely with KADOKAWA to provide Crunchyroll fans with access to the anime, merchandise, and books that they have demonstrated they want time and again.“ About Crunchyroll: Crunchyroll is the destination for the largest and latest lineup of anime, manga, merchandise, and exclusive content in the world. Crunchyroll brings hit shows to millions of viewers around the world and allows them to purchase related merchandise through its online store. Through its app on game consoles, set-top boxes, mobile devices and more, Crunchyroll delivers content from leading Asian media producers directly to viewers translated professionally in multiple languages. The service is available for free or through a premium offering that allows users to watch ad-free with access to simulcasts—top series available immediately after Japanese broadcast. Crunchyroll’s majority investor is Otter Media, a joint venture between AT&T and The Chernin Group. Crunchyroll has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and is a member of the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA). About KADOKAWA: KADOKAWA Corporation is a leading diversified mega-content publisher in Japan with a wide range of businesses including publishing of books, e-books and magazines, production and distribution of anime and motion pictures, game development and sales, merchandising and digital media among others, centered on a media-mix strategy leveraging on its rich content IP portfolio. KADOKAWA is the subsidiary of Kadokawa DWANGO Corporation, which was formed in October 2014 intended to establish the world's leading platform for digital entertainment content. Edit: After @Nosebleed mentioned it in the comments I decided to add this to the topic aswell, I had seen it but didn't want to mix both things but Oh well Japanese publisher Kadokawa Corporation announced on Monday via press release that it is entering into a joint venture with New York-based publishing company Hachette Book Group to publish manga and light novels in English. Under the new joint venture, Hachette's Yen Pressimprint will split off from being a completely-owned Hachette Book Group company, and will be jointly owned by Hachette and Kadokawa, with Kadokawa having a 51% stake in Yen Press. The new joint venture will launch in May, and Yen Press will be renamed Yen Press, LLC. The press release mentions that Yen Press is the second largest English manga and light novel publishing company in North America. The press release also mentioned that sales of light novels have increased since Yen Press began publishing light novels in 2014. The announcement added that the new joint venture aims to establish light novels as a new content genre by using Hachette's existing production and distribution infrastructure, with Kadokawa providing leadership. Yen Press vice president and publishing director Kurt Hassler will continue to lead Yen Press LLC under the title Managing Director and Publisher. Yen Press previously collaborated with Japanese publisher Square Enix to release manga in English digitally. Yen Press was founded in 2006 and aside from manga and light novels it also publishes Korean manhwa, Chinese manhua, original American comics, and original English graphic novel adaptations of existing properties such as Twilight and Maximum Ride. Thoughts? Opinions about it?

Practically every time you spend money, you're giving that money to billionaires. Eating out anywhere? Billionaires get paid. Buying food at a grocery store? Billionaires get paid. Going to a theater? Billionaires get paid. Riding a bus? Billionaires get paid. Taking a shower? Billionaires get paid. Want to breathe? Billionaires probably get paid somehow. Unless you live a super austere lifestyle where you don't have any luxury goods at all (and computers, mobile phones, TVs, etc are luxury goods), your justifications for piracy are nothing more than self-serving and extremely hypocritical. Either admit that you just want free shit, or actually dedicate yourself to this righteous cause of yours instead of so thoroughly half-assing it. Because right now, you're hurting the little guys WAY more than you are the big billionaires. If you're okay with that in your quest for free shit, fine, just be honest about it.

If you want to pirate games, go ahead. Don't dress it up as something it isn't though. Money and man hours went into creating them, regardless of the size or perceived greed of who owns the rights to them. It's not sticking it to the man, it's just plain old copyright infringement.

It's fine to make a thread about your creative works here, but I think changing the title a little, and maybe moving this to the creative corner is a good idea. I would recommend making a thread much like the others in the creative corner, with a chunk of information about the book, perhaps an introduction to the characters, a little longer plot summary etc. As it is right now, it is hard to know exactly what the books are about, and so it might make people less inclined to buy them. If you have a more inviting thread, with information that is easy to proccess and understand, it will make people more likely to buy your books. Anyways, best of luck to you.

Welcome! I never have any cool katawa shoujo or moe to give out... BUT I DO HAVE MEMES! would put that amazing picture under a hidden content tag thing but i have no clue how to so that....

Only kids try and dress piracy up as something it isn’t. If you steal, you steal, most people on the internet have at some point. Rationalising it with excuses like ‘they’re rich enough, how dare they try and make more money’ makes my eyes start rolling.

Yes, adults with money. I don't think I've pirated a game (VNs withstanding) in well over a decade.

This seems like neat news, but I definitely love the news about YenPress more I do truly hope there'll be more mangas and LNs As for this, it'll probably solidify Crunchyroll's place in this business, which is never bad

Yes, making lists of things to do is a great way to postpone other things you have to do while making you feel like you're actually doing something

The word you're looking for is "primes." Routes A Prime, B Prime, etc. edit: It's heavily recommended that you read the prime routes in reverse order.

oh internet. never change. thats madness Zebhra. MADNESS! well, you know what they say. YOLO good luck in your run.

This is kind of a tough thing, and to be honest, if I could go and not give a number score, I would do that. I wanted to give more of an assessment as to how the game was compared to the relative newness of the publisher and if there's merit in the product as well as potential future products from said publisher. Which is why I spent more words on it than your average FUWA review, to give it a more personal take as to what I thought was good and what could be improved, as well as compared to some other newer indie novels I've read (though not mentioned in the review). In that, I'd hope the publisher takes more of the words to heart and not the number score - I mean, if I gave the number score only based on how it plays compared to every other VN out there, I couldn't honestly give it higher than a 6 - it's clearly not as polished as other VNs you'd find on the review page, so giving it a higher number would do both Impulse! and other visual novels a disservice. But I also don't want to compare it too much against those high-ranking novels, because it's not an established publisher - it's NWG's second attempt, after all. I can't expect it to be Steins:Gate - it's one guy who likely got help from some friends for the voice acting. So I felt, in having to give it a number score, a 6 felt about right - it's a higher-end score for the scale being used as compared to what's been reviewed before under the system. If we were to break our number systems by say, one each for indie and established, I'd probably give a 7.5-8 to Impulse, higher if some of the basic technical parts were addressed in an updated release. I mean, the only thing I really ripped was the one piece of art with the van. Everything else I found at least some merit in, even if it wasn't great overall. Which brought me to the final paragraph, which I feel is the most important of all - "Would I want to read another offering from New West Games based on reading Impulse?" And I would - I think Kieran has a good knack for story pacing, has some interesting concepts in gameplay that could be fleshed out with practice (or getting some crew) and anything I felt wasn't up to spec is completely within his power to get better at, and I'd like to see that effort. If he were to use any part of my reviews to sell people on his game, I'd say it would be better to use that as opposed to the 6/10. He was serious about his next VN being about girls volleyball, by the way. I'm looking forward to it.

Listen to your heart

Today I was once again reminded why I hate arguing. I effectively wasted 4 hours of my life with explaining my unchanging viewpoint to others with opposing unchanging viewpoints. So now I'm sitting here asking myself; What was the point? And why did I not just use my time for something that is actually worth it?

"When people ask for objective reviews, they are not asking asking for 100% objectivity, they are asking for the pursuit of objectivity. You can never 100% achieve objectivity with a review, but you can pursue it to the best of your ability. And that means attempting, where relevant, to either disclose or put aside your personal biases. That does not mean, that you can't express your opinion, far from it. What it does mean, is that you should attempt to contrast your opinion with those of others and put yourself in the shoes of other people. When you're writing a review, obviously your personal experiences and own opinions are going to be a huge factor there. But as far as I'm concerned, you need to make a decent effort to look in from outside, to look through the window. Put yourself in the shoes of others, because your ultimate goal is to serve the consumer. - In my opinion. I've built my entire business on this very idea, that everything I create is not for me, it's for the consumer. And I need to try and detach myself from my personal opinions from time to time. I could still use them heavily - and I do - but if I have biases, those are the things I should be disclosing to my audience, so that those, who are watching my critiques, are made aware in advance of the kind of biases that I'm going to be holding. I probably won't be able to do it perfectly, because I'm going to be able to explain a point of view that I hold much better than one I do not, but you should be giving it a try, frankly." - TotalBiscuit This copy&paste is basically exactly where I stand. If you didn't like a certain aspect of your reviewed piece of art (like the comedy), but don't have enough knowledge about that to ascertain whether or not fans of that aspect would enjoy it, make sure to make your readers know that you don't like this particular part due to your personal biases/preference. If you can't set aside your bias, at least explain it.

Watching this thread is like watching a train wreck, so naturally, I want in on that action. The fact that one person can't actually know exactly what another person would think about any given stimulus isn't especially relevant to the discussion, because pragmatically speaking, people actually do communicate effectively about their tastes and preferences. You probably know someone who has tastes similar to you. And much more interestingly, you probably know people who have tastes different from you, and you can predict (with some degree of accuracy, obviously not 100%) how they will react to certain stimuli. This is powered by empathy and sympathy. These fundamental human faculties can, when put to good use, make that judgement on behalf of other people fairly effective, especially when helped by broad categorizations like genre, theme, etc., (e.g., "While I'm not a nakige fan, people who are able to emotionally invest themselves in that formula will probably get a lot out of this"). But obviously one opinion is never going to be exactly the same, or exactly accurate, as that of another person. While not "objective" in a strict sense, this is still potentially useful information to provide to others, and is frankly extremely common in reviews.

I am heavily in favor of keeping review scores. I think they are a big help in allowing readers to... how do I put it? Understand and come to terms with the reviews? Even after reading the entire review, the score somehow helps the brain in conceptualizing what it all means, it puts the text they just read into an easy to understand context. However, I don't like the ten point system. Especially if there are half points. I will now argue in favor of a 5 point star scale with no half-stars, similar to the video game website that is among the most respected for their integrity, Giant Bomb. First, the problem with 10 or 100 point scales (we ultimately use a 100 point scale, although I basically have been limiting myself to 20, only going in increments of .5), is that they're too specific. Too absolute. The scores almost discourage people from reading the text because they feel like they've learned all they need to know when they see something like 8.7. It also sounds too definitive to the average user. Like when we say something is 8.7, we say that this is exactly what the game is, no more, no less, like a mandate from Heaven. It's the kind of precision that does not accept any questions or dissent. But no matter what, reviews are a very subjective thing. We should be wanting our readers to think for themselves, to ask questions, and to dissent. This is where the pros of a five point scale come into play.The point values are fuzzy and broad. They basically go as follows: "awful," "bad," "average," "good," "great." This has a large number of benefits. First, the broadness forces users to read the review to fully understand the meaning of the score. They see a 4/5 rating, go "Oh, they think it's good... but how good?" and proceed to read the rest of the review. Instead of being an absolute, final conclusion, it's an invitation to read the actual review. And once they have read the review, they then have to think about how the text relates to the rating. The more they think about us, our review, and the more they think critically about the game we're reviewing, the better. Secondly, the broadness of the scale invites our reviews to use the entire scale more liberally. For whatever reason, one thing that has been figured out after decades of different review methodology is that the more compact the scale, the more people are willing to accept reviews on the extreme ends. It's a weird psychological issue, but that's how it actually works. When someone sees a 2/5 star rating, they go "Oh, so they think it's bad? I wonder why." And when they see a 4/10, they go "Holy shit, they fucking dumped on this game, didn't they?" Especially if you use stars instead of numbers. Two stars out of five is an idea, 4/10 is a number, and people interpret numbers differently, more concretely. This also means we can give games 5/5 stars. 5/5 doesn't mean perfect, just extremely good, and you don't feel like you have to justify a 5/5 review as stringently. But our reviews may be reticent to toss out 10/10s and such, even though I would encourage everyone to use the whole scale, and that 10/10 doesn't mean absolute perfection. The more of the scale that gets used, the more meaning it has. Take the age-old criticism of IGN (although they've been better about it in recent years). They've been criticized for using a 40 point scale, 60 - 100. Anything at 60 is dogshit, anything below 60 is still dogshit. The more of the scale you use, the better. Most of my other points are variations of the other two. Readers are a little bit more able to accept dissenting opinions when they're presented as being out of five stars as opposed to numbers on a larger scale. The biggest con of a five star scale is that a lot of people don't actually want to have to think. They just want to see a score, read the final paragraph, and have the conclusions drawn for them. I don't think should we care if we lose those readers. Another con that doesn't really apply to us is how metacritic reads your ratings. Giant Bomb has talked about how they've gotten a lot of flak for publishers and have even been blacklisted by some because they give a game a 4/5 when on a 100 point scale they might have given it an 85 or 86 or whatever, and metacritic lists it as an 80. They don't seem interested in bowing down to the pressure, and this pressure wouldn't even exist for us. I just mention it here because it's almost comical how dirty the video game industry is sometimes. Overall, I think a five star scale is the best compromise between no score and the system we have now, and is the best system available to us.

lol

Tabletop Simulator is $9.99 on Steam right now. Buy it. I am salty I paid $19.99 for Nosebleed's copy a day earlier. Fuck me. Seriously, buy the damn thing so I can play games with people. Secret Hitler and Arkham are the bee's knees.

I have a "I've been playing this game daily every single day for 200 days and I deserve some compensation, dammit" deal

I think a reviewer's job is to write about what was interesting about said work and what was bad. You can write whatever you want, in whatever fashion, artistic freedom and all that. Frankly I find that rather pointless when I am reading a review. I want to get something from a review. If the reviewer hates the genre of said work. And produces a long review about everything he doesn't like about the genre he sees in the work. His review is quite useless. Who wants to read something like that? Aside from the bashing fun. If you actually put some effort into being objective you will make something that is more practical for others. You can never be completely objective and neither should you try to. Rather gain the insight that you will see things in a different light. In addition to your personal view.

Hello and welcome to Fuwa, hope you enjoy your time here on the forums Have a Neko: Anyways good luck and see you around

Yes it was and on that note... I'm buying it right now!

Kadokawa is Big Anime. Seems like they have their tentacles on half the shows coming out.

of course I dont believe in vns, its fiction lmao

this is pretty cool. good for crunchyroll for this. i hope to see more quality content from them.

real hip hop

I am so envious right now. If I'd managed that, I would've woken up at 8 AM and probably fixed my jetlag in one night. Instead, I woke up at 5 AM. Make a list. Make specific goals. Make sure you're making progress on those goals. And do the cleaning within the next two days, because you can actually knock that out in a day and make your list shorter, which feels good.

\ / MonMusu is proving itself to be surprisingly adorable. I'm not sure what I was expecting but... this wasn't quite it. In a good way, of course.

Confession: I need to turn my life around, I need to clean my apartment, I need to take my education and my music seriously, I need to begin working out, study more japanese and read more visual novels.

if you only use chiitrans to display the translation of ATLAS or LEC you can also use nextOSD someday i will make a tutorial for it although it's pretty simple to use.

I really liked how ds1 begins, you are thrown in a cell to die and someone helps you out and after escaping you are on your own, choosing where to go even if it is a zone that you cant handle at that time, dark souls 2 kinda ruined that and sadly this one so far doesnt look very different at least so far, no branching routes to pick at the beginning and the travelling system is more like in demon souls, but then again I only played for a few hours can't say for sure. well I'm sure mods will take care of that at some point, they did this :

yeah dark souls 2 wasnt bad but the combat didnt feel like dark souls something was a bit off... this one even if it is faster it does feel like dark souls 1, i like how some enemies wont let you get behind them, like the knight, he just throws his big shield at his back and stop you from going in circles around him xD No back-stab for you mister i love that.

Do you think such users will start reading reviews thoroughly just because you take away scores? No, they just won't visit the reviews they didn't intend to read--or stop visiting the site entirely. In general, seeking to exclude users because they won't use your site as you intended is not a good strategy. You should seek to broaden your audience, not constrict it. Trying to get users to change their browsing behavior is futile. You can provide features that make intended behavior easier and therefore more common. Or you can directly address the demand for meaningful scoring, as I've proposed.

...and? ;d Have you managed to do some progress? Today I finished route B and read routes C and D. It was so fast paced and godly written, that I was just absorbing the text, without reading it. Really needed that change of quality after few days with boring, stupid and bad written Grisaia. Anyway - both of those routes were absolutly great. Level of mindblowingness was just right - high enough to 'not understand' what is going on, but not as high to completly fly from my mind. Hopefully route E and then apostrophes would be as good as C and D. ^^

Ultimately a review is the subjective opinion of the person reviewing it. However, certain elements of that review can be objective. For example; saying the micro-transactions are invasive and in your face when reminders of them show up all the time in the pause menu can be something everyone agree i an objective statement. this could also apply to more subjective areas such as story, like saying the ending of the game is pure sequel-baiting and doesn't conclude the story.

I primarily use ChiiTrans, it places a textbox over the game and you can set the words to display furigana, it also works in fullscreen mode. You can also edit the entries pretty easily for names and whatnot.

Pros and cons section will absolutely stay. If score gets removed, it will be replaced by something else.

guys how about instead using numbers to score games we use stars

And I though all vaginas looked like a bunch of pixels.

@starlessn1ght The thing is, I really and seriously don't want to play everything from March... just because I have time doesn't mean that it is worth me using that time to do so. I have other games to play, books to read, and work to do. I might very well play them as random VNs during the summer, when I probably won't have anything better to do, but it is hard to get up the interest to play a lot of the VNs on March's list. I don't want to read Maitetsu because Monobeno was my limit (actually over it) for lolige and Maitetsu is even worse. I don't really want to read the new Dies Irae right now (and maybe not ever) because I honestly don't have a desire to revisit the Dies Irae world without a whole new cast of characters. Jeanne is giving me headaches from trying to ignore how much I dislike what they are doing in the game. My reasons for not wanting to play Shoujo-tachi were made pretty clear in the previous one, but I'll add another... I'm seriously bored with seishun drama now, and combined with my increasing distrust of anything by Takahiro that isn't Majikoi, I find it hard to get up the motivation to play it. Giga's newest 'Kiss' series game is just out of the question. I might very well dig into Astronauts new dungeon-crawler... if I can decide whether I think it will suck or not.

Yes, I do beleive that VNs as a medium can tap into realistic modes of human thought. Very few of them do, but there are some out there, and the medium definitely has the potential to have more of such works. I emphasize the ability of VNs to communicate human thought, because even in VNs where some unrealistic events are happening, the emotions and that characters feel could still be portrayed realistically. A few VNs that I feel succeed in capturing realistic emotional (and sometimes intellectual) responses are: Narcissu, Symphonic Rain, Yume Miru Kusuri, and Swan Song. Then there is Sayooshi, which while it portrayed the perspective of an insane person, did a really good job in portraying his insanity. There is no reason why VNs can't have intellectual merit. There exists a scarcity of such works because 1) it is an entirely new medium that has only really been around since the 90's. 2) The medium isn't profitable enough, and when money is tight, content creators are more scared of the risk of doing creating something unique.

With the new server set up there's only one more step to getting the first batch of banners onto the beta site, which will also allow me to push updates more often. Please look forward to seeing some of them coming with the planned update tomorrow.

Turns out that come later today, I'll be gone from Fuwanovel. I'll not be able to enter the site and I am not entirely sure how long that will be for. It could be a week, or it could be a month (or three). Why am I making this post? Well, because ...More or less. Feel free to move this to the coliseum of chatter if you want, but I'm not without precedent. Additionally, you'll be able to choose my avatar for the time I'll be absent. Suggest pictures for me to use as an avatar and I'll choose one of them. When I come back, presuming I really like it, I could even keep it for a while. I'll be here for a good part of today, but I'll soon be disappearing. If you want some sort of reason, knowing that it's connected to internet and me moving about should be more than sufficient. In short, real life. I won't exactly be loafing around, for those wondering. Until then, I bid you farewell.

shitty quality but still, here's quack