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Apparently, fuwanovel(dot)org now redirects to some site that tries to install adware on your PC, and I discovered it accidentally clicking an old link (doesn't work in https). I know, nobody is going to check all the old topics and change the links, but is it, perhaps, possible to do something automatically? I know, some forums don't allow linking the sites of their competitors, for example.

From this day on, I'm in the select group of people who have seen Clannad's true ending. But I disagree, Daru: it doesn't actually teach you the meaning of life.

Congrats, man! Have a diploma for your achievement

Oh god, this is going to be a busy evening...

I never really got into visual novels much. I was really into anime back when I was 15 and I watched some key anime and heard that there were "games" for them. Same happened for danganronpa and school days. School days was such a weird experience that I wanted to search for the game itself (plus youtube-chan said it was animated). So I kept googling it but all that came up was websites having moon runes in them (dunno if School Days was translated back then or if I was bad at searching stuff). Then I searched for English visual novels and boom.... Katawa Shoujo came up. So I played the game and after finishing it, I searched for similar English visual novels and this led me to this website, fuwanovel itself (a friend told me about it). I found Danganronpa and started playing it. Since I started playing visual novels after Katawa Shoujo, characters being voiced was such an amazing finding for me. I really liked the concept of visual novels because I had a really bad imagination (still do!) so voiced characters + seeing the expressions of characters + having some kind of an ost playing in the background + still having the novel atmosphere was really a good combination. I then read Steins;Gate and Fate/stay night and didn't manage to finish one whole visual novel since. So I can't really say that I really got into visual novels. As you can see, what I found to be barriers for me to get into visual novels were several things though (those are subjective to me and probably not a lot of people agree with me on them) : 1-Sexual Content: until F/SN, I didn't really have much sexual content (I used to skip h-scenes in katawa shoujo) in my visual novels but the sexual content in F/SN had to do with the story so it was arguably ok. I still didn't feel a need to go into an h-scene from beginning till end. I used to read books from time to time and sex scenes were just implied and not described form beginning till the end in full detail (and ofc didn't have illustrations for all their stages) so it was really annoying for a bit since they were not enjoyable. Additionally in other visual novels, sexual content felt really unnecessary. I still think of most sexual content in the visual novels to be utterly unnecessary because there are nukige after all. It's like ignoring all hentai and doujins and just overly implementing h-scenes in all anime and manga. 2-Idea of routes: despite me liking the idea of being able to choose a route, the inconsistencies in some routes really aggravated me especially in quality. I was never the kind of guy who you can tell "The story gets better ahead so keep reading". This happened with Shizuru's route in rewrite and mitchiru's route in grisaia no kajitsu and they both made me drop their respective visual novels. 3-RomCom moments being way too long: even in games that were not considered moege, the romcom moments were still way too long (e.g. fate/stay night itself). Trust me, I do love RomCom moments but I don't want to spend over 10-20 hours of my reading experience on it. And obviously it gets even worse in games that seem to be dedicated to RomCom but are still long (in terms of hours) like my gf is the president, princess evangile and almost every common route (especially in key visual novels like kanon and rewrite and it kinda continued in the routes to a huge degree). Such moments eventually feel repititive and boring for me, put me off and I stop reading the visual novel for a while until I ultimately lose all interest in the visual novel. 4-Setting of visual novels and being repetitive: Now this is not a problem for me towards visual novels only but it has really irritated me even in anime and manga. After consuming japanese products as my hobby for about 5 years, I am starting to get bored of the same highschool setting with the same generic characters having the same character traits that were introduced in the 80s and 90s and then they were thought to be amazing to just repeat for almost 3 decades. All encounters start to feel so cliché to the point that it's just a meme when they happen. Lack of seriousness and being almost always unrelatable started to become annoying. I guess you could say that not introducing relatable problems might be good since it's a means of escapism but I'd love to see relatable problems from time to time.

Biggest reason it is like that is because it is a massive time sink for very little gain. Lead admin is a med student, many other site leaders are enrolled at universities or pursuing careers. There were many large projects in the works, but because the site admins work for free (Fuwanovel operates at a loss even with donations) there is very little incentive to dedicate hours upon hours creating content that would fulfill the many goals this site has. For example, most of the steam curation team has left to do other things with their lives. I and Palas had been working on a project to create an OELVN update tracker, but the amount of time we put into it was pretty heavy, and on top of that, half of the OELVN teams I contacted never once got back to me and hid updates behind a kickstarter paywall. Perhaps the biggest obstacle facing Fuwanovel is that the leadership that does stick around and loves VNs ends up going to work in the VN industry to actually get paid. The simple fact of the matter is that Fuwanovel is at this point simply a community with popular VNTS updates. I highly doubt any new projects are in the pipeline, so the site is in a what you see is what you get phase. It really is difficult to dedicate time to building these projects while neglecting a million other things in your personal life that you would rather deal with.

@Kurisu-Chan @Zidan209 Enjoy!

Thank you sir I'm going to frame it and hang it on my wall with my other diplomas

For those who might be interested, a playlist of all the speeches at VNConf18 and my presentation on Trends in Visual Novels is up on youtube here. I'd highly recommend them, there are some really interesting (and hilarious) presentations on all sorts of topics. HD versions of my charts as well as a few extras is up on my accompanying blog post here.

I am a CURIOUS person. Therefore I am always reading the bad end because I need to know what "SHIT" is going to happen. ^^ If the bad end was really cruel than I am going to CURSE myself and the author.

Hah, this was actually exactly the thing that re-ignited my interest in VNs, the anime was so messed up that I had to find out what the good routes look like - basically to see if the story can have a happy end at all. I really liked both of the girls and wanted to see them getting some happiness. I've played Analogue: A Hate Story a few years earlier and loved every piece of it, but didn't really get interested in the genre. From School Days however it somehow escalated into yuri OELVNs, than Flowers and I was hooked ever since. So, there was no real "entry barrier" for me, I picked them up being so old that neither reading nor sexual content could really scare me off, as long as I've enjoyed the story. It just took me cutting down on other games to "free some space" for VNs and truly appreciate them.

TL;DR version... what got me into VNs was... Archer from F/SN. Now let me explain. I learned about F/SN and thought "I have to try this shit" but when I saw it was a VN I was discouraged because I thought at the time that VNs were really boring game that having nothing to "play". So I went to the manga version instead (dumb me). I always read tons of manga. And I was instantly hooked! Especially in the Archer+Rin parts (the manga version was a mix of Fate and UBW). They're my OTP and I loved Archer (still love, my precious husbando). Except... they abruptly ended the UBW coverage to finish the manga with the Fate route. And they did that exactly in the day they went to Ilya's mansion in Fate. I was enraged, so so pissed. Without understanding anything, I looked around to understand why they dropped a bridge on Archer's head and found out about the routes and such, that I didn't knew at the time (like I said, I was dumb). My next thought? "I need to read the VN. Screw boring, I need to know the rest of Archer's story!" UBW was as awesome as I expected it to be. I have fond memories of the time I read it. And I found out that VNs aren't boring. And never stopped playing ever since. And then I went down the slippery slope and started reading BL like crazy but that's another story...

weeeeeeeell, i got into vns after discovering 2d boobs. id say the start really was persona 4. this got me more interested in jrpgs and japanese medium as a whole and lead me to... hentai. this lead to me acquiring a vn called x-change because of one fact. boobs. i would say my journey took a turn when i read katawa shoujo. i gained a deeper respect for vns and their structure after that and began to seek more for the thinking part of my brain and not the libido part.

Man, I love bad endings. I never skip them, unless they are just pointless "nothing happened" ends, that are used in moege/ charage sometimes. But bad ends with a few CGs and some actual story? Sign me up! I normally play bad ends first, actually, before the good ends.

That tagline is literally what brought me here after I've (re)discovered visual novels and decided to devote more of my time to them. What makes me a weirdo is that from the very beginning I was actually infatuated with OELVNs and I'm only very slowly digging into the "proper" VNs. My personal view is that VNs will always be a niche genre in the West because of their strong connection to "weeb culture", which grosses many people out (that very much includes OELVNs) and to a lesser extent because of the stigma connected to sexual content in them. And because people playing video games or watching anime around here are not really that much into reading. Apart from the super undemanding titles like Nekopara or Sakura games, there's simply no mass market for them. I'm also pretty sure that VNs will never go far in the West without a healthy OELVN market. The actual "hardcore" VN community is very niche and hermetic, like most fandoms of this kind and as long as people are told to learn Japanese if they want to get involved and western stuff is treated with disdain, the community like ours really won't help things much. Progress is obviously happening thanks to more and more major JP titles being translated, but those also might hit a wall quite soon, if the fanbase doesn't expand steadily - I don't think those horrible sale numbers of A Sky Full of Stars are just because people were bitter about h-scenes - there's simply not that many people interested in buying quality JP VNs and the market is getting saturated. I think an interesting question is what we, as a community, can do to popularize VNs in the West. I desn't look like we're doing much right now, because outside of the forums, the site is rather stagnant. While the VNs in the West are booming, at least in some respects, we're just cuddled in our own, super-niche corner, ignoring the filthy masses roaming around Steam and other places. Optimally, we should do something to reach people outside of our own little circle, how and who should do it is a nice topic for discussion. EDIT: And when it goes to setting and giving VNs a "western" feel, definitely. But I don't think I've seen a VN developer that didn't come from the "weeb" culture and wasn't heavily inspired by some JP VNs. It would be extremely hard to escape that association because it's a core feature of the genre and part of its identity. The thing that we should do away with is mindless copying - there are situations where using Japanese setting adds something to the game (DDLC is a good example because it tried to look as generic as possible to make the twists more powerful and unexpected), but usually, it's just lack of imagination IMHO.

Pretty much this for me. I really enjoy how VN's give my imagination a workout. I also enjoy facial expressions and voice overs (2 things a book won't give you).

Thank you!

Those certificates are issued by a different institution.

You forgot that i was also a friggin Elitist that understands Rick & Morty.

Sounds good, wanted to do a maintenance run either way. Our hosting provider DigitalOcean offers new plans and we can save 50% in hosting costs, but the server needs to be shutdown temporarily for it. I'll try to update outdated links while I'm at it.

Steins;Gate got me into visual novel. I'd say the barrier i got before was...eh..the fact i had to read an actual book with pictures on my screen, i mean, why should i do that? i can pretty much play a video with explosions and be the guy who make these explosions happen. But no videogame gave me the feelings those 66 hours of Steins;Gate gave me, no one was even close to it, that's why i read VN, to experience something different, something closer to opening a book.

Plz, it's "Mr.". Or at least it was last time I went to the bathroom. The whole ordeal has been around 13 months (not continued play), 65 hours and 14 characters (light orbs).

VA-11 HALL-A is seriously good, so +1 to that. One of the better Cyberpunk stories out there Utawarerumono sequels (Mask of Deception and Mask of Truth) are also really worthwhile. Could be grouped together I would also recommend SeaBed, but since it just released and pretty much no-one has read it, that can wait

WOW I never thought I'd have someone with an almost similar story with mine. (except the BL things) I was a huge manga/anime fan and I was a friend suggested the FSN manga to me... So I checked it out... And I got hooked! I have always been a fan of intersting settings, and the Holy Grail war concept was a very promising premise... plus Archer is as cool as you can possibly be. So one of my classmates back then saw me reading the manga in class (I wasn't a particularly good student) and casually noted that FSN is actually based on a game. So I searched for it and found the VN format of story telling. Interested in the format, I looked up other VN titles, then I saw Clannad. Then I knew that I had to read it. I looked for sites that I can download VNs and found Fuwa. With a copy of FSN and Clannad, I started reading. I had to drop FSN because I was having a hard time reading it because a wall of text in front of the cg background is really different from anime presentation with subtitle. Also I held off on starting Clannad, hearing that it is a grueling VN that is extremely long to read. Not wanting to give up on the promising mediium, I picked up an unadapted VN, G Senjou no Maou. And there's that. Five years later, while I haven't read as much VN as I would've liked, I'm still very engrossed in it.

Yumiko best grill

1 - Yeah, sexual content is a problem to a lot of people. It's already part of the medium, though. I remember how surprised I got when I saw a lot of friends and people I knew saying things like "I don't to read VNs with sexual content" or "It has a good story but I dropped because of the sexual content", I never saw it as a big deal but I can understand them. I believe the best they could do is start making VNs with the option to able/disable h-scenes so everyone could be happy. Also yeah, the young ones wouldn't be able to appreciate the medium with this strong sexual content presence, that's important too. Though it's a bit different if the sexual content is dark, people are too sensitive nowadays. 2 - Doesn't really matter. If it's good, it's good. VNs should keep their japanese setting since, well, it's their culture after all (Unless a writer wants to use a different setting, every writer should write about what they want to write). Now OELVNs can be different, yes. But if you think they should change the "standard" to appeal to the general western audience, then shouldn't they also change everything else? Like art, soundtrack, narrative and so on. If someone is tired or disinterested in japanese culture and "standards", then this person wouldn't like VNs in the first place. In the end it becomes something completely different, maybe a new medium? And that wouldn't help VNs becoming popular here. It should be noted that I'm refering to people who don't really have any contact with japanese culture, few people that dislike anime would want to read VNs, for example. People that only wants to complain how their VNs almost always happens with high school students or things like that shouldn't be considered (Because they are already part of the ones who read/play VNs, duh). 3 - So one day I wrote a review about a certain Visual Novel, and a friend of mine came and said "I didn't read it because it's too big". An other person I know once said: "I don't have the patience or time to sit through 10 hours of text with nothing happening", and an other friend of mine once said: "There's no way a bunch of text can be exciting". Our society is growing more and more impatient, years ago people would be willing to sit through 12 episodes of an anime just to see the big twist and the story finally "starting" (e.g. Steins;Gate). Nowadays if an anime doesn't explain everything in the first episode, they drop it. This is the mentality a big part of the general audience have. Then you have VNs, which has several hours of text and sometimes dozens of hours of text, what do you think would happen? People don't even pay attention to what they are reading/watching, let alone interpret or reflect over it. To cater to this audience would meaning losing it's identity as a "Visual Novel" the way we know it, would the great popularity be worth it? I strongly don't think so. VNs with gameplay would help, though. I'd say the gameplay would be a way to entertain someone who is not willing to read hours and hours of text. In other words, it works because it's the way it is. I don't think they should sacrifice what I call the "cultural roots" so it met the "standards" of the west, I think this line of thought is pretty dangerous too. Though it's about a completely different theme, Sakura Quest anime dealt with this discussion about "making a small culture big so people from other places could enjoy it too". Visual Novels are like birds, they can fly high, there's a lot of different types and even some types we don't even know, sometimes they fly together in the same direction, they can be big or small, but more importantly: They are free. Let them be free, it's not worth to trap it in a cage just so you can show it's beauty to other people. There are those who can love birds, and those who can't, it's simple as that.

I began with Tsukihime. Understand, my biggest barrier to playing VNs was erotic content. For better or worse, I was living like a monk at the time, and I wasn't interested in being reminded about sex. I often acted irritable and made uppity anti-sex speeches back then... (Yes, I was that bad). However, a friend in the anime fansubbing community insisted that I should play Tsukihime, so I reluctantly did so... and I was instantly addicted to the VN experience. I went through every VN translated at the time inside four months, then immediately moved on to untranslated and haven't looked back since. Looking in from the outside, I'm pretty sure people will say I am an addict and need help... since I restructured my entire life around paying for my habit and blow thousands of dollars on it every year. However, I'm reasonably happy. Edit: Yes, I am living proof that visual novels obsessively make you over into a fetishist pervert. I've been corrupted and I am at peace with my corruption, which is probably why I always feel empathetic toward the fallen goddess heroines in Venus Blood games.

Sachi is the best (N°9 i n my VNGirl top) Too bad the routes I read were disappointing (Kajitsu or Meikyuu's AS) Having said that Makina is a worthy opponent (N°10 in my VNGirl top) My personal ranking : Sachi = Makina >> Amane > Yumiko >> Michiru

I can't even guess to what the average age of vn readers are in the west is. All i can say is that i'm at the age myself where i like the teacher and other older side characters better than the heroines But back on topic. I think a gameplay compontent is essential to a vn's success in the vest. Some of the best jrpg games are almost like VN's anyway. Take shin megami tensei and persona. Super popular games and are like dating/visual novels.

Accurate representation of how my mood was during this past hour or so

To clarify, I don't think it's the only reason visual novels aren't more popular, but a very significant one. Working on your "wrong market" theory: do you think if people could, say, easily buy and play a vn on their e-reader alongside traditional e-books, this would help?

The best part about Fate Stay Night bad endings for me was all the trips to the Tiger Dojo after the fact. It helped liven the mood after some of those grisly endings. God, that reminds me of Mizuha's bad end I felt like such a shitty person after that ending.

Nobody is really forced to do anything because of people's expectations.

I think I'm in the camp of "there's essentially a massive amount of reading in most vns, and reading is not that popular". I also think there's a high entry barrier: at least for me, personally, getting into visual novels was difficult. I was already a weeb and fond of reading, so that wasn't the problem - rather it was hard knowing what to expect from the medium, and crucially, becoming accustomed to their pacing. I think it's interesting to compare, say, comics/manga and visual novels. Both have text and visuals, and are not a genre but rather a medium. It's also tricky, imo, to get into them and enjoy them at first. Oh, and both are often not taken seriously despite incredible works in each. How did other fuwaposters find their first visual novel experiences? Was it easy to enjoy them straight off, or did it take time?

This. I can't stand to think of having missed endings. I think it's fun to see how badly wrong things can go. And as mentioned some vns have bad ends with story. I like to visualise all the different routes and branching paths from choices as a map of that particular visual novel's universe, and it saddens me to think of not finding out all its facets, good or bad. Although admittedly when there's a very large number of or difficult to find ends I sometimes give up.

Glad to see all the love for Asako and Yumiko

Yumiko and NO ONE ELSE! Too cute

Makina > Yumiko > Amane > Sachi > Michiru for me.

Makina>Amane=>Sachi>Yumiko>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Michiru.

It's a really close call between Sachi and Michiru. I think I like Michiru better not exactly as a character, but rather on a personal level, but I enjoyed Sachi's route 1000 times more, being actually my favorite route of Grisaia no Kajitsu. Mmmm, difficult, very difficult, let's say to be safe that this is the hierarchy: Sachi=Michiru>Yumiko>Makina>Amane But to be honest, it would probably be more like this: Sachi=Michiru>Yumiko=Makina=Amane So yeah, for me Sachi and Michiru are above the rest, whom I like all the same. EDIT: Makina wins the award for the funniest quotes ever though, only at the level of Sachi's

You're no weirdo, I'm quite the fan of OELVNs myself. You're not alone in that! Addressing your other point, though, I do think there are OELVNs that have no connection to weeb culture at all whatsoever. Cinders, in my opinion, is a good example of an OELVN that subverts many of the traditional connections to, er, weeb-ism. It has a distinctively European art style, no sexual content, and a lot of input from the player. It's not a perfect or all-encompassing VN by any means, but I think it stands as an example that a connection to weeb culture is not a necessary ingredient to make a successful VN. Unless you mean that people will simply see that it is a VN and instantly mark it off as a weeb thing... while I would like to think my fellow humans are more open-minded than that, it may indeed be the case. I'm interested in taking on similar things, if you ever felt like working together on something or sharing ideas! I do agree with you that Fuwa is pretty barren, with the site being even more so than the forums. On your first point about heroines, I agree that it is a defining attribute and a big selling point, but note that I don't think it should be removed entirely from the genre necessarily, just that the way for other types of VNs should be left open. You later mentioned Danganronpa, which I think is a good example of a very successful VN (although some wouldn't call it that, I suppose) that subverts the traditional trope of pursuing heroines' routes while also selling very well. Popularising Japanese otaku culture in the West is one way of looking at it, I suppose. It seems your opinion is the polar opposite of mine — I feel as though the West should have its own VN industry that stands on its own two feet, whereas you think that the Japanese media should be retained but popularised. I agree with you on the point that VNs aren't available physically in the West, and that digital distribution is often a complicated process due to the, er, proclivities, of some visual novels. I can't really disagree there. Porn games will always appeal to people that are interested in playing porn games, and I don't think having a gratuitous display of nudity and such will really change any of their minds. The way VNs are presented is definitely important in how they are generally viewed by their potential audience; I really can't imagine linking a friend that hasn't played any VNs to Mangagamer to look at Dies Irae, for example, without him getting the wrong idea about my interests... I think you basically have the same ideas as Lesiak and I with regards to Fuwanovel itself. I think giving more attention to OELVNs could be helpful, without degrading the quality of content we have here in terms of Japanese visual novels. OELVNs rarely get any attention on the visual novels subreddit, which is perhaps the only other significant VN community. Are there good OELVNs being released though? Maybe, maybe not. But I feel like if one were released tomorrow, the world wouldn't know about it.

For example, they realize that their final work is shit and needs to be redone from the beginning. Or, maybe, an important person for the project management suddenly disappears due to rl, and it all falls apart.

Yumiko is the only real answer, all other answers are wrong. Unless Asako's VA counts.

lol Fap away my dear friend. Fap away, like there's no tomorrow. And then you do it some more, until the skin starts to chafe and you regret everything.

I can't agree with that. Things happen. And some people loose interest.

Don't the h-scenes speak in a universal language?

So I got the normal ending of Swan Song and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand I generally liked the story and how fucking bleak it could get I mean god damn. On the other hand it is way to heavy handed at times and has a lot of intolerably slow moments that sometimes drag the story down. I also was not a fan of the visual style of this vn I like sprites and it was weird not having them. One thing I really didn't like was all the times where a character would just regurgitate word vomit at you at random times. It was really annoying being assaulted by these massive walls of text, your character only egging them on for more and more. I'll get the true ending tomorrow and then move back to NLA I still have glasses girl and teacher lady to get through.

One of the best things I have ever seen Holy shit.

Both of these pictures were taken by me. First one was taken while I was boating on a lake and the second one was taken of the sunrise (or was it the sunset?) over Daytona.