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So we all know there's multiple ways to help us read Japanese VNs by now. All Japanese VNs have text you can grab and display, which makes them an easy target for practicing reading. There's one downside though, visual novels are typically incredibly long, especially if you are a beginner (yes, even the shorter ones can take a while to read if you're inexperienced). I always thought this downside affected lots of people that wanted to practice reading but didn't have the time/energy to read through an entire VN in Japanese to start with. However, other mediums like manga and LNs are much more difficult due to requiring you to either constantly look at a dictionary or just know all those kanji from memory (with the exception of manga that have furigana, but those are usually aimed at younger audiences and might not be the most interesting). It felt unfair that such fun media couldn't be used as easily to study Japanese. Well luckily yesterday I was talking to a friend on discord and fanboying over the Monogatari Series with them and they ended up showing me a few tools they used to read LNs, and after that I myself looked up for ways to read manga in Japanese, and thus we come to this thread in which I'm hoping to share something useful with those of you who wish to read these mediums as a way to practice Japanese. Note: If you know any other/better software, please by all means share it! Kanjitomo Kanjitomo is an incredibly useful software to read manga on your computer. It detects kanji/words by simply hovering over them with your mouse. But not only that, it gives you the reading/meaning of those words/kanji. And lastly, if it fails to show the correct kanji, it shows you a list with similar looking kanji for you to browse, it also lets you edit the individual kanji contained in the word in case it guessed the 2nd or 3rd characters wrong, thus always letting you pick which is the right one. Some screenshots: Advantages: Easy word lookup Very customizeable Let's you actually import images and scroll through multiple images in a single folder. Also supports Chinese Disadvantages Can get laggy sometimes (mostly on startup) The zoom feature can get somewhat annoying to control Although it lets you import files, I found the file viewer annoying to use and prefer to just use some other software to open the images Download (requires Java to be installed): http://kanjitomo.net/ JGloss This software is primarily geared towards books. What it does is it lets you import .txt files (or copy text) and open them in the reader. After that it places furigana on top of all the words, and also creates a glossary of words on the right for you to look up if you need. One feature I really appreciated in it was that it only displays furigana for the first instance of a word only, forcing you to memorize the word after that (although if you want to, you can select the word and it'll look it up for you regardless). Now you might be thinking, doesn't Translation Aggregator also do something similar? While TA does indeed have these same functions, TA is mostly practical for smaller chunks of text, not whole sections of a book. Screenshots: With translation enabled: Advantages: Easy way to read large chunks of text with furigana Can use different parsers. Can also place the English translation underneath the words if needed Creates a glossary of words for an easy lookup Pretty costumizeable interface (you can change the font/size/colors/etc.) Also works with German Disadvantages: Requires you to copy the text or have a text file of the book you're reading, which doesn't always happen. Parsing is not perfect and you may find some weird results at times (but that's the same for any Japanese parser). It seems to have a certain limit of text it can display (I kept running into an error when I imported a lot of text), so you may not be able to import whole books but instead have to copy multiple chunks (they're pretty big chunks though) Download: http://jgloss.sourceforge.net/ Yomichan Yomichan is an Anki add-on that lets you read text and look up words while simultaneously being able to create an anki deck for the words you want. This tool is incredibly useful if you want to study and read a book at the same time. Screenshot: Advantages: Lets you read entire books at once (you can also copy the text) Very easy to create an anki deck with the words from the text Disadvantages No furigana on the text itself Requires you to have the book in a .txt file More useful for studying than actually reading Download (requires anki to be installed): https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/934748696 Capture2Text Capture2Text is a simple but intuitive OCR (Optic Character Recognition) program that lets you select a part of your screen to convert into text. It's useful to grab whole sentences from a specific bubble of text or a sentence from a book and automatically copy them to your clipboard, which you can then use to do whatever. If you're a translator, it makes the script writing process much easier since you don't have to manually input everything. (I don't really have any screenshots since all the software does is grab and copy text.) Advantages: Easy way to grab text from an image and paste it onto your clipboard (or someplace else) Works well in conjunction with other software like TA. Disatvantages: The recognition can fail pretty hard depending on the font used (you can easily end up with scrambled jibberish) Download: http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/ I know it's not groundbreaking and it might not even be as appealing as just grabbing text in a VN, but I find manga and LNs very fun and less tiresome to read and so these tools come in really handy for that purpose. Think of it this way, do you want to start practicing Japanese by reading an entire visual novel with more than a thousand lines from the get go, or would something smaller like a 20 page manga chapter be a little easier for starters? Of course, this doesn't mean you shouldn't try to read visual novels, they're great practice, but I think a lot of people lose themselves when starting off with them and perhaps these tools will help keep the focus on studying and memorizing things a bit more instead of just reading.

Next up in our parade of visual novel punctuation: the interrobang. That’s right, I said the interrobang. Can you believe it?! Huh?! What the hell's an interrobang?! "Interrobang" is the term we'll borrow to describe that little dogpile of punctuation, usually represented as ?! or !?, that sits at the end of nearly every question in a visual novel. It's meant to convey incredulity, combining elements of both a question and an exclamation. And, since the typical VN's stock-in-trade is exaggerated emotion, you'll end up seeing it a lot. Because why have your characters simply ask a question when they can GODDAMN SCREAM IT at Samuel L. Jackson levels. I mentioned we're borrowing the term. The actual interrobang (‽, a ? combined with a !) is a bizarro punctuation mark crowdsourced by an ad agency back in 1962, along with the term “interrobang” itself. (If Wikipedia is to be believed, other suggested names included “QuizDing," “exclamaquest," and “exclarotive.”) It fell out of fashion after the 1960s, though, so you'll rarely see it in the wild. Still, it lurks in the Unicode of a few fonts here and there, lingering on like some creepy conjoined twins left chained to a steam pipe in the dark basement of the English language. In the meantime, we'll appropriate it here to describe its unpacked counterparts, !? and ?!. So is it “!?” or the other way around?! Now that we know what our faux interrobang does, our next concern is how it should be edited. Do we (!?) shoot first and ask questions later or (?!) vice versa? There’s little agreement among language mavens as to which is correct, and most VN scripts I’ve seen switch between the two on a whim — sometimes in the very same line. Thus, it falls to the editor and/or translator to impose some order on the situation. The simple answer: Pick one and stick with it; I don't really care which. Consistency is our primary concern here. The standard emoji character set uses !?, so you'd be entirely justified in rolling with that. Some argue that !? is also more typographically appealing, and I'd tend to agree. However... The advanced answer: My own preference is to switch between the two on a case-by-case basis, with ?! winning out 95% of the time. That's because I tend to think in terms of nested levels of punctuation, rather than a monolithic model. Which is to say, the sentence should be read structurally as: with the ! modifying a base question and turning it into an exclamation. Since that’s what the interrobang typically does, I end up using ?! in almost all instances. But there are exceptions. Imagine some friends who find out they've won a contest to meet David Hasselhoff. Mid-celebration, it occurs to them they didn't actually enter, so there's no way they should have won. Here, a base exclamatory statement is being modified into a question: (We did it!)? so !? would be the more appropriate choice. This kind of usage requires an editor or translator to make lots of judgement calls, however. If you don’t feel comfortable getting that deep into the contextual weeds, there’s absolutely no shame in going the simple route and using one option across the board. What about interrogangbangs?!?!? Last but not least, we have the situation where a character goes into full freakout mode and says things like: In these cases, make sure the first piece of punctuation aligns with the intent of original sentence — is it an exclamation or a question? — then keep the rest of the punctuation exactly as it appears. Or, if you’re opting for the simple method, don’t change a thing. Just stick with the punctuation as provided and keep on walking. It’s what The Hoff would want.

Get out Go back to your books Run away and never return

Considering mommy has dollies of The Avengers, daddy is in the clear.

Chaos;Head, people were badmouthing the anime back then (yeah... the anime is just trash..), then the pacth came out and it was awesome.

Value is relative. This is a Steam gamer's perspective: "I can buy AAA budget games deep discounted for $10-20 1 year after release with 50-100hrs of gameplay, that cost much more to develop. Why should I pay the same or more for a low-budget title of the same length or less?" The answer: You pay a premium for niche content. AAA games have a large budget but also a large customer base to disperse those costs over. VNs are niche with a smaller customer base, and therefore they have to keep prices somewhat higher in order to recoup costs (as niche content also tends to have a more inelastic demand curve; as price decreases, sales volume doesn't increase quite as much). But mainstream AAA games are limited in the types of content they can feature, as they must always have broad appeal. Can't have hardcore ero in a mainstream title, for example.

One Thousand Lies. I don't expect much from free games but this has a somewhat unique story and hilarious character interactions.

They're mostly positive so far merely because I haven't gotten around to reviewing it yet.

OH MY GOD!

You're welcome. (Still working on the dollarpound.)

"Mommy, why does daddy play with dollies?"

Genuinely can't think of any. I've got a bunch of examples for the opposite though.

Not really, because I rarely get into vns/games/anything that don't have an immediate appeal to me. With pretty much all of my all time favourite pieces of media, I had this strange feeling about them in advance, something about the imagery and/or sound that gave me high expectations. That feeling has never let me down, except with Sekien no Inganock, which just felt like most of the story was going over my head. I do have one example though. While I had high expectations of Planetarian, I did not expect it to completely destroy my understanding of stories and leave me with a much greater appreciation for good writing, plot and characters

Kimi e okuru, sora no hana. Wasn't really sure what I was getting into when I started it. In just kinda picked it up because Matsuri looked hot, not even kidding It ended up becoming one of my favorite VNs of all time. It was so beautiful, I still go back re-playing a scene here and there, just because I enjoyed it so much. It also introdouced me to my all time favorite waifu, An.

I thought I should post an update on what's going on: The name was chosen - it's going to be "Mikan engine". Thanks, Scorp! Open source project was published at https://github.com/mnakamura1337/mikan_engine Feel free to join and contribute! Noratoto converter + porting scripts are publishted at https://github.com/mnakamura1337/noratoto_port If you own Noratoto, you can convert it to .story format yourself by running these scripts If you don't, well, it never hurts to ask around Currently I'm working on better support for BGI engine with never (subroutine-based) scripts.

I still don't think you need to understand a language to understand the emotions a voice conveys.

I am also love childhood friends, except Airhead-Deredere with ultimate cooking skill. Hell, Tomboy/Coodere childhood friend is the best <3

Uh, what's up with ppl on steam reviewing the game without even reading it? The top review sounds like they played a Sakura game or something. So misleading. T_T

Hi there, fellow VN fans, I always had a thought: why do we have so many proprietary and semi-proprietary VN engines? There are *many* defiencies in having a closed source engine (and kinda inaccessible VN content): there are problems with running it on many platforms (like 95% of modern VNs are released for Windows, good luck trying to read them on your Android / iOS device), there are these infamous problems with "Japanese locale required", sooner or later platforms become inaccessible (good luck trying to run some less popular games of Windows 95-98 era - they won't run on modern Windows 7/8/10 in any of the compatibility modes). If one wants to grab text for translation, one has to resort to really ugly API hooking hacks. Etc, etc. So, why not just convert VNs to some easier, more universal, accessible format? I've followed the pattern of ScummVM project (a universal engine that runs adventure games) and thought - why not? There are 2 projects close to what I thought: that is VNDS, which is, unfortunately, dead, and Asenheim, which is, unfortunately, not free/open source and I can't participate in it. Today I'd like to share some of my progress, proof-of-concepts and ideas. I've studied several VN engines, namely: Kirikiri2 (AKA TVP) NScripter BGI (Buriko General Interpreter) Whale Caramelbox SysAdv Ren'Py Tyrano Yuka VNDS Asenheim What do I have now: An understanding of some common baseline capabilities that all these engines have A project of JSON-based format (basically, some metainformation plus an array of simple instructions like "show text", "show graphics", "play sound", etc) A proof-of-concept engine written in HTML5+JavaScript (well, actually CoffeeScript) Most important: some working converters for several games that can be used on original games' data to make a "port" that my engine will be able to run A list of VNs I currently support and working on: Koisuru Shimai no Sextet - https://vndb.org/v13353 (Yuka) Zutto Tsukushite Ageru no! - https://vndb.org/v8439 (Yuka) Moshimo Ashita ga Harenaraba - https://vndb.org/v100 (SysAdv) Sakura Swim Club - https://vndb.org/v18261 (Ren'Py) Edelweiss Eiden Fantasia - https://vndb.org/v2093 (BGI) Koneko Doumei - https://vndb.org/v153 (BGI) Nora to Oujo to Noraneko Heart - https://vndb.org/v18148 (Whale) Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru - https://vndb.org/v195 (Caramelbox) Here's how it looks like: A few nice things that I already have is full customizability (like using any skin for every VN for UI), support for multiple simultaneous languages (like showing original Japanese + English translation for the sake of learning Japanese from it), support for annotated Japanese (i.e. adding furigana and/or hovering tooltips with word translations), etc. It's very easy to run HTML5 engine on Android and iOS (tried both), thus enabling one to enjoy reading VNs on the go. I want to ask if anyone would be interested to take a look and possibly join me in developing / using such a concept? I'm almost ready to publish it all as open source software - actually, I just need a good name for the engine Any ideas? If anyone wants to try translating any of mentioned games using my engine - please contact me too. Anyone who wants to participate in any way (i.e. checking out demos, porting more games, playtesting, etc) - also feel free to contact. UPDATE: The engine is released in public and available to download at https://github.com/mnakamura1337/mikan_engine

http://store.steampowered.com/app/345620/ And now the wait for 18+ begins.

Definitely looking forward to buy it. .............just as i finish collecting money to buy phone, laptop, and college books

I don't get to go to a lot (or any) cons so if I want something I pretty much have to bite the bullet and get it shipped. That said I combined it with the companion Tohsaka fig (also at 30% off) and the shipping was easily combined, so it worked out in the end.

I love your blogging about issues I haven't really considered, but are actually quite important. On top of informative, it forces me to stop and think, which is a good thing. Like with your last entry (about quote marks), I have to point out that most VNs use the character encoding cp932. ‽ isn't included in that one, meaning while we might see it in the wild, it will not be inside VNs, at least not those using Japanese engines. It might appear in engines using utf-8 (those claiming international support). Doesn't look like solving !? or ?! with just a merge to ‽.

Holy colors, batman. Okay, this is most likely actually readable to you since your monitor is probably using a high color temperature, but I personally use f.lux at the lowest color temperature I can get. The text is basically unreadable without highlighting it. Anyway, I actually thought that "?!" was the standard rather than opinions being split. I definitely agree with you in your usage recommendations, though; there are so many !? I'd have preferred to be ?! in various translations... I must also add that "interro" comes first in "interrobang", and thus it clearly makes more sense for the question mark to be first as well.

I have spotted a couple of mistakes, (they forgot to put spaces between a couple of words in a sentence,) but overall it's not bad. It feels natural. I haven't really noticed any blunders anywhere, except for those 2 sentences lacking a few spaces. The writing isn't exactly rocket science, but editing / translation wise, it looks pretty acceptable.

Most Japanese horror games aren't really horror as we know it, but are more like psychological thrillers. If you just want something to scare the shit out of you, I can recommend phenomeno as well. It's pretty much what you asked for. Short, non-h and art by one of the best Japanese illustators alive today, Yoshitoshi Abe

<3 https://soundcloud.com/animuzacks/aria-the-animation-op-single (This is kinda mislabeled. It's the insert song for episode 12.)

Maybe Imouto Paradise and Eiyuu Senki. While the former was still nukige to me, at least from Rio and Aya route it show some potential to be normal charage (It helped that the staff probably allocate main writer to those 2 routes imo), and for Eiyuu Senki while I just expected some kind of genderbent historical figure harem plotless game, the story ie plot was surprisingly quite interesting, especially in middle game and end game which managed to get my attention here. PS - Just check VNDB, and find out that Eiyuu Senki writer was same people as Kichikuou Rance, TORI (No wonder Eiyuu Senki end game remind me of Kichikuou Rance. Oh, and she was also had most of Rance series as her resume, including famous Sengoku Rance). PPS - Now that I remembered that I also had same case with Shuffle. In fact I was kind of expect it would be almost all sex when I played Shuffle (Couldn't be helped here, considering I just finished Shera My Witch back there). And I'd find Shuffle was quite funny and had less sex scene, so it's quite good to me. Also with Kira Kira, when let's just said the normal end wasn't that I was expected.

I gotta admit, I will say that was a title that managed to vastly exceed my very minimal expectations, and pleasantly surprised me.

I have a few First and foremost, Dracu-Riot. It has the things I would ever want in a moege. Good cast, good story, actual 'problems', amazing SoL and so on and so forth. Princess Evangile. Being the first VN I ever played, it had to have something special for me to get gripped in and that is Ayaka's route. Sepia Tears. This is the thing that recovered my faith in OELVNs. It's the definitive OELVN with a Japanese-esque setting for me. Hoshizora no Memoria. Still when I hadn't completed tens of VNs, tis one stood above the rest and is still the testament of my favorite VN developer, Favorite. And lastly, Kusoge. Yes, this is a joke/satire VN made with Ren'Py, but it's the best I've experienced. The jokes and references are actually funny and not just grating like most joke VNs.

Kana Little Sister was kinda strange for me when I first started reading VNs a while back. I heard someone say that it was a VN about incest, so I said, "Why not?" because that's the only logical thing to do, right? It actually surprised me that it was more than some weird fetish novel.

Now the Dark Pharaoh looks as intimidating as his actual character.

at least it was good romcom trash eh, amane switch, I knew it was right up my alley when I started it up, but I never expected so much drama that was somewhat basic but felt well thought out. Dra+Koi was a little vn I played because I love dragons, I didnt really have any expectations for it other than I have heard good stuff about the guy that wrote it, it was really good for a rather small vn.

Dracu-Riot. Honestly, I was expecting it to just be more romcom harem trash, but it was surprisingly fun to read through and I ended up putting it on my favorites (although it's still romcom harem trash).

It's probably not worth it anyway, just like GnK wasn't really worth it. And yet I'll probably buy it at some point. That's the perverse nature of my love-hate relationship with this torrid franchise.

Next / Go - Left mous button, both enter-keys and maybe space bar Hide UI - Esc/Right mouse key History - Scroll/ Backspace Load - L key/ designated number (ie. 5, for example) Save - S/ designated number Quickload - Q/ designated number Quicksave - Some key close to 'Q' in this case, probably 'W' or 'E'/ designated number Settings - Esc/ Backspace Exit to title - Most likely double-tapping some 'rarer' key, like F10, for example Exit game - Same as the previous one Skip to next choice/ previous choice - Holding down or double-tapping right and left arrow keys respectively One step backwards/ transition to a previous line - Works in conjuction with the backlog by backlog having some sort of an option of jumping to a line in every line Skip - Ctrl Toffle Fullscreen On/Off - F Most of the things that seem to belong in the settings-menu should be put there without a keybind. Saves and loads usually have buttons in the UI, so it's debateable if they really need keybinds. Settings-menu usually works as a menu in-game, so return to title and return to menu should probably be there and not have a keybind at all. Skipping and skip to the next/previous choice are usually in the UI if they're present in the engine/game, so they don't necessarily need keybinds and Ctrl works as a manua skip, being that it stops skipping as soon as you let go of the button. One other thing that's usually present is the 'repeat voice' keybind, but that's usually within the UI, and if need be, I'd probably put it in as 'R' or a designated number.

People are spoiled nowadays, take everything for granted and think everything in the world should be available to them for free.

Hakaze Kusaribe - Zetsuen no Tempest

That's a funny way to spell "years".

Growing a fuck

It's coming...

ChuSinGura46+1 is like 60 hours long and has five ero scenes which are utterly terrible. The game is actually gonna be improved by cutting them out. Like, even FSN's sex scenes are a billion times more relevant to your enjoyment of the work. xD ...and I usually like ero in my VNs.

Well hey, my mistake for thinking people here cared about VNs, I guess. If there was ever any chance of these releases ever making it to the west - or even MG just acquiring the rights to the Alchemist/Kaga assets - there sure as hell is none now.

I was like, convinced you were Kingdomcome for a second there Anyways, welcome to the forum, nice to meet you!

For a moment there I confused you with @kingdomcome because you two have the same avatar. In any case, welcome to the Fuwa forums. Hope you have a good time here and that you find what you seek, also good luck with your project.

I rate the avatar 9/10 it's very beautiful avatar picture