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Heh, I remember one of Mikandi's translators used to post on this forum. He came on to defend the 'desu' inclusion. He refused to listen to the advice everyone was giving him until he practically had no choice. It's one thing to receive feedback, it's another to read it, but it's yet another to analyse and critique the feedback given to you because you're committed to improve. We'll see what happens. Kudos to Derg for shoving complaints down their throat till they could ignore him no longer

Prostudent G and Nova are the masterpieces of the month, but when there's a choice I'd choose anything over bakage and thus Nova is VN of May 1993. 1. Noltia ノルティア [930514] Flat 1 Noltia contains three scenarios, which are not related to each other story-wise. All the three share traditional Japanese adventure gameplay, with "Look - Talk - Think" verb command pattern, no inventory, no puzzles, and plenty of text. The first one can be played as either of its two main characters - the boy Aruto or the girl Kyoko. Both are not what they seem to be: Aruto is working for a registry organization in the World of the Dead, and he has to bring Kyoko to judgment, where it will be decided whether she goes to heaven or hell after death. However, Kyoko is actually an angel, whose goal is to save Aruto from killing himself. Both characters have special bars - the well-being of the protagonist and the proximity of the opponent to the protagonist's goal. Command choices can increase or decrease either of these statistics. Wrong choices can lead to Game Over. The second scenario casts the player in the role of a high-school student named Yoshihiko, who is hired by a gym teacher to take erotic pictures of high-school girls and bring them to him. This scenario allows movement through school locations (menu command "Move"), and, depending on the player's choices, Yoshihiko can succeed in taking the most erotically satisfying pictures, or achieve one of the "bad" endings. The third scenario is a realistic depiction of a relationship between a young man named Eiji and his little sister Miwa. The player can choose to play as either one of them. Eiji is dating Miwa's schoolmate, and Miwa tries to understand the change in her own feelings. In this episode, the gameplay is rather straight-forward Japanese adventure. Only third story is serious enough. It also uses zapping to switch protagonists, which is really fresh. A very nice experimental work without emphasis on H-element. It's one of the works that allows us to speak of 1993 year as the golden age of visual novels with lots of original stories and emphasis on scenario. 2. Tenshi-tachi no Gogo Special 2 天使たちの午後SpecialII [930514] JAST Main hero is high school student. But he also steals money and assets from villains to return it to the proper owners. One day he received a request by mail to get "Blue Diamond" out of debt situation. The only common part with the predecessors is that it's a school mystery. Game series is changing very slowly over time and thus starting to look bleak compared to competitors. Anyway, character design is cute and it's still possible to enjoy the game heartfully. 3. Prostudent G ぷろすちゅーでんとG [930515] Alice Soft 1 2 3 By the end of the 20th century, radical educational reforms have transformed the Japanese society. Students were split into opposing groups, and the more aggressive of those eventually formed a dominant organization named Order of Black Phoenix, centered on the cult of a mysterious person known as "The Queen". Outcast students have escaped to a secluded island near Okinawa. A wandering lazy and lecherous manga and anime fan named Gorō Endō teams up with a female teacher and a few students to lead an opposition force against the oppressive governing circles. Bakage from AliceSoft. Even the synopsis does not make any sense. And it should not - in fact, it's possible not to follow the story and still enjoy the game in he fullest. All kinds of elements are mixed together with constant parodies, gags and unrealistic events happening. I prepared a full review of it. 4. DOR Special Edition Sakigake ＤＯＲ ＳＰＥＣＩＡＬ ＥＤＩＴＩＯＮ 魁 [930521] D.O. 1 DOR Special Edition: Sakigake is the fourth entry in the DOR series. Unlike all the previous games, it contains only one scenario instead of the usual three. The scenario follows the story of Kensuke Funaki, a young boy who attends a prestigious private high school, where the students specialize in sports as well as various theatrical activities. The biggest event of the school is an all-female wrestling competition. Kensuke finds himself in a promising situation: in order to secure his support, the young and pretty competitors are willing to go far - very, very far... The story does not differ much from other DOR stories. But this game's feature is unusual sound and partial voicing. 5. Nova ノ・ヴァ [930528] Cat's Pro. 1 2 The protagonist of the game awakens in the cryogenic chamber of a spaceship, unable to remember anything from his past and only vaguely recalling his name. Something strange is happening on board the ship, and it is possible that unknown creatures have found their way into it. The protagonist meets other crew members and together they try to find out what exactly is going on. The first serious work of Cat's Pro and already a masterpiece according to my rating. Actually Nova has three stories that happen roughly at the same place in the same circumstances, but only first story has enough longevity and complexity. It also has the most mystery and SF elements in it. Three stories is an experimental structure to satisfy as many players as possible. Still the selling point of the game lies in magnificent graphics and sound. 6. Hitomi Zaka ひとみ坂 [93] Higashikai Hotsujuku 1 The story itself is about a group of friends from high school after school is over. Everyone hangs out in a coffee house, goes on dates in said coffee house, plays occasional games of football, and sometimes go out to do stuff like visiting the fair or play the piano. There is an English review. 7. S.A. S.A. [93] A-Inn A collection of two short erotic stories Scenario 1 is about a parent and child coming to main character's house for recruitment purposes. Protagonist manages to coerce child to intimate relations. Scenario 2 is about main character graduating from high school and gathering to move out. At the same time imouto starts to gain consciousness as a woman. Siblings share their memories before the departure. Short erotic stories, but with great visuals. 8. The Ooya-san - Tamattemasu yo! Yachin ga!? ザ・大家さん たまってますよ！家賃が！？ [93] Soft Circle Courreges Ohayama Harumi is the son of apartment complex owner. One day his father gives him a telephone call and asks to gather rent from five girls that are late with the payment. The girls prefer to seduce the guy and he's such a virgin that can not say no. Nothing special.

EDIT: Right now there is a new pass being made to the translation, so there is hope after all. For more details, check out the game's kickstarter page. I know there are already several posts talking about the translation of this game on the forum, but some people might have missed them, as the bulk of the posts were made some time ago, so I figured a new thread might be in order, now that the game is out for everyone. I have been reading the game for about 2 hours now, comparing the JP lines to the English translations as I read. This translation is very literal, to the point where the English sentences often make little to no sense. The biggest issue seems to be that the translator transliterated everything. It seems like he/she just looked at the Japanese line, and word by word, translated everything directly into an English sentence as is, without any re-wording, giving no thought to how the line would flow in English. And the result is... terrible. From what I can tell, the translator has not made any rookie JP mistakes, like mistaking particles etc, (though keep in mind I could only go by the voiced lines and not the narrated ones, as I do not have the Japanese script in front of me.) That being said, an "accurate" translation doesn't really mean much when the English is barely comprehensible as a result. A few examples of what you will see in the translation: (Decay also posted some examples last month, which you can see here.) Screenshots: You also have things like this: This is an official localization, and yet it reads like a bad fan TL. We should not be okay with this. Many of us paid money for this. From what I can tell, the translation's accuracy is not the issue, but the translator's lack of English knowledge is. A proper editing pass and some QCing could fix 90% of the issues in this translation. We should all, (in a calm manner, of course,) ask Mikandi to do something about this. Whether they will actually listen to us or not is hard to say, but I'd like to think they will. Their PR has been on point through the entire campaign, (they were logged into this forum just last night, showing that they are checking the threads about their game frequently) and if enough people voice their complaints about the translation, I hope they will look into doing something about it. Tweet them, comment on their kickstarter page if you are a backer or post on their website. Make your stance on the TL known. If one person complains, nothing will happen, but if everyone does, it's going to be hard for Mikandi to ignore us. With their prevoiusly open attitude towards the community, I'd like to think they will listen. So, for the moment, my recommendation is that you do not buy this game. Wait and see if they will do something about our concerns first. Hopefully they will listen and do something about the TL. If you buy the game now in its current state, just be warned: it's not very good, and you might come to regret your decision.

Read Saya no Uta and enjoyed it immensely! Just felt that I should report that here. And I decided to continue reading VNs since I don't feel so lethargic anymore. Will read the ones recommended here. I'm grateful for all your help guys! I should finally be able to finish Shikkoku no Sharnoth soon which I've been putting on hold for months now.

Like many of the charage I choose to replay for this particular part of my blog, Golden Marriage is one of those VNs I thought I didn't quite give a fair chance to the first time I played them, looking back. In retrospect, I realize I'd really come to expect great things out of Ensemble due to the examples of Koi no Canvas and Gokigen Naname. The former is a kamige, beyond all doubt, and the latter was a deliciously dramatic look into the muddy world of money and old families. While things turned out well in the end in Gokigen Naname, the story itself is full of dark elements and stomach-twisting moments (in particular the main heroine's path). Because of this, I have always felt subconsciously that I didn't give this game a fair shake at the time. I also felt a need to see if Ensemble's generalized drop in quality was my imagination or not... Golden Marriage is seen by many fans of Gokigen Naname to be a watered-down attempt to 'recapture the magic' of that game in a slightly less... extreme situation. There is good reason for seeing it that way, as you can see the influences rather obviously if you played the aforesaid game in the past. Both games are based in situations where the protagonist is surrounded by wealth, both games have people with dark motives lurking in the background (or in the foreground), and both games are very conscious of the way people go insane for money. However, there the similarities end. Golden Marriage is a much, much lighter game in every sense than Gokigen Naname. It lacks the poisonous acrimony and cutthroat nature of some of the relationships in that VN, and the protagonist is actually the obvious central character of the game (whereas the main heroine was the center in Gokigen Naname). Another issue is that the protagonist, Nagisa, while having had some bitter experiences, has turned out to be an essentially good person with none of the excessive attachment to money that defined many of the characters in Gokigen Naname. If Gokigen Naname was a picture of what happens to people when money twists their lives beyond recovery, Golden Marriage is a picture of characters who manage to avoid being poisoned by moneyed influences despite living close to them. I chose to do Touko's route first, because she is a type of character I didn't really have a taste for at the time I first played this but developed one for later... the intelligent but slightly cowardly otaku. She attaches obsessively to those things and people she cares about, and she has a deep sense of compassion and curiosity, as well as a strong sense of obligation. She and Nagisa are childhood friends, but her path manages to avoid the usual pitfalls of the osananajimi path (namely the shift from friends to lovers), instead focusing on romance and the drama of the financial world and its pressures (without taking it down the darker paths). She is also probably the most privately affectionate of the heroines, and her lazy-dere is adorable. Jewel Days' after story doesn't really add anything to the story. What it does is provide you with an idea of what Touko intends to do with her life with Nagisa in the future, as well as dealing with the wedding ceremony itself. As an after-story, I had to tilt my head to the side and wistfully wish they'd done something more with it. If you were to ask me which heroine in this game makes the biggest initial impact, I would definitely reply that it is Rei, the game's resident 'artist'. To be specific she is, of all things, a viola soloist. Upon meeting the protagonist, she immediately proposes marriage and tells him in a rather forthright manner that she needs money to pursue her art, so she picked him as a potential mate. However, only a short time later, after hearing about his parents, she bursts out in tears on the spot and proclaims that if he marries her she'll make sure he gains the greatest happiness of all. To be blunt, if I were to pick which of these heroines was the most vital and 'alive', it would undoubtedly be her, by several leagues. She is a shameless dreamer, a pursuer of her art for the sake of pursuing art, a highly emotional individual, and at the same time practical when it matters. Her path lacks the sheer drama you see in Touko's path, but it was definitely one worth playing, despite that. Her FD after-story shows off her personality (familiar at this point) and her more developed relationship with Nagisa quite nicely... but it is also based before the events in the epilogue of the main game, giving me reason to be dissatisfied (I would have preferred this kind of story to be in the original game and the after-story to be about something after the epilogue). Marika is Nagisa's cousin, a young princess of a Germanic nation (fictional) who has been in love with him since early childhood. Whimsical, highly intelligent, but more than a little careless of the trouble she causes others through her whims, she drives Kumi (the protagonist's bodyguard) up the wall. Her 'path' in the main game basically involves a brief promise to consider marrying her in the future, before it cuts off. On the other hand, Jewel Days gives her a full-length path, based a few years after the events in the main game (all the events in Touko's and Ruri's paths have occurred in this one, save for the romantic ones). Her path is, like Ruri's and Touko's from the original, somewhat tinted with dark elements, mostly because she is a princess and a princess's life and choices are never entirely her own, even in the modern world. The antagonist the pops up is the same string-puller as in all the paths from the original (I'm not going to spoil it), but this time his role is a bit less extreme than it was in those two paths. Marika herself is a wonderful imouto character, lol. For those who are interested in Kasumi, I should mention that I deliberately ignored her path, because it was the path that made me score the game somewhat lower when I originally played the game. Kasumi is the protagonist's co-worker at his part-time job and a kouhai at school. She is a hard-working girl who is raising her younger siblings because her parents vanished after their company collapsed. She is rather obviously infatuated with Nagisa from the beginning but far too shy to do anything about it. I can honestly say that she would make a rather nice average-level heroine in the average charage... but she wasn't an interesting addition to this game. Yukariko is the Miss Perfect of this VN... elegant, intelligent, compassionate, wise, and graceful... and her path is the second worst in the VN. To be straight about it, the main issue in her path at the beginning is so... stupid. I can understand where it came from, but it really felt like the writer couldn't think up a really good conflict so made one up out of thin air. This was the second element that led to me giving this game a poor rating... To be blunt, I hate the type of path where they basically say 'The problem with going out with the perfect woman is...'. That kind of BS just makes me roll my eyes, and the way Nagisa suddenly becomes an idiot in that path at all the worst times made me fall asleep. Ruri is the active, straightforward girl in the mix. She is the daughter of an old-style (nineteenth-century, lol) Yakuza boss, but she is in rebellion against her father's wishes that she succeed him. Naturally, her path is a bit more dramatic than the other paths, and there is some minor action involved. However, when it comes down to it, the Ruri portrayed in this game is just 'your average girl' who happens to be able to stare down punks and beat the crap out of them if they get above their station, lol. I have to say that, amongst all the Jewel Days paths, this one added the least to the experience. It is basically dating issues and sex, so I can straight-out say that you've seen everything of interest once you've finished the path in the main game. Now, that ends my exhaustive overlook of Golden Marriage's heroine paths... and I have to say I'm glad it's over. Most games don't have this much disparity between the paths in terms of quality, so I usually don't end up with as much in the way of mixed feelings as I have now. As a charage, it is excellent... but that's just comparing it to the huge piles of steaming brown stuff I have to wade through to get to VNs like this one. It still doesn't even get close to Koi no Canvas or Gokigen Naname for raw quality, but if you want a decent charage about a rich protagonist, this is a good choice.

https://vndb.org/v2585 (really easy to read and to follow) https://vndb.org/v18778 (really long but nothing complicated, pure SoL with romance) https://vndb.org/v5700 (easiest of them all) https://vndb.org/v1209 (your regular charage) https://vndb.org/v17843 (another charage) https://vndb.org/v1132 (this one is not voiced but it's actually pretty good and easy to read) https://vndb.org/v2603 (not a super happy story but i recommend it) https://vndb.org/v1510 (short sad/bittersweet stories if you could read 120 yen you would be able to read this one) https://vndb.org/v6695 (only read one route but it was easy and also pretty sad) https://vndb.org/v551 (good and easy also sad) https://vndb.org/v3061 (really easy to read) https://vndb.org/v478 (really easy to follow and easy to read, sad one too) those are easy to read, with easy i mean you can follow the plot easy enough and there is no action involved or anything too complicated also the writing is fairly normal (there is a bit of action in konata yori), bear in mind that even the easiest vn out there would have some hard parts to read. PD: Yes I like sad stuff xD PD2: I forgot to say, dont read something just because it's easy, read something that you like even if it's hard, reading something easy but boring wont help you accomplish anything,

Have lots of respect for you - there's been a lot of snark being aimed at Mikandi (not wholly undeserved, mind you) lately, has been a semi-bitter feeling to read some of the more toxic opinions on Twitter~

So, they finally replied to one of my comments about the TL quality. It's pretty vague and doesn't really say much, but it is nice to see a reply nonetheless. This survey could be a good way of giving them some honest feedback. (Constructive feedback, of course. Nothing is gained from just being an ass.)

Tsukihime (by the creators of F/SN) is also pretty good. I'll also recommend Steins;Gate. I would also be recommending Soul Link, except that it's a bit late to be buying a copy since Navel's new management has no clue what they're doing.

Isn't "yeah123" a "she" though?

Eien no Aselia and Seinarukana

You might want to look up: Comyu (lots of action and modern fantasy, romance is okay in most routes) Fate/ Stay Night (as above, but less focus on romance and hella detailed setting. It's a fairly long VN, but it's one of the best IMO) Dengeki Striker (not really fantasy, lots of fights and romance. Story seems a bit silly in the beginning but gets really damn serious later. A bit rushed in some places but a good read nonetheless.)

Oh, we have plenty of new announcement planned, fear not! "Frontwing TV Live" is a reference to our periodic "Frontwing TV" live streams, specifically the fact that the panel will essentially be like a live version of that.

Late to the party here, but let me to join here nonetheless. As for the recommendations, I think Phenomeno would be good for you because it was very short, because I think short VN would less likely less time with word and go straight to the point. Another recommendation from mine here would be True Remembrance if you interested with more short VN, and I also think it's going to be less wordy than usual VNs. Hope those'll be help.