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Someone was horrified at the school system when he saw this: I said I can do better than that and showed him this that I reproduced:

Started reading Fureraba ....... and what have I gotten myself into? I don't think I've laughed so much in the first hour of a VN before....

That's why I said GOG. Entering an established market is tricky. You need to spend time and money on marketing and hoping to get some awareness and attention in order to get a even a tiny fraction of the market. Right now the VN community is flaming Steam and people talk about a doomed VN future (or risk of it). GOG shows up and get hero status by ensuring VNs can still be purchased in the future. This spreads as fast as the Steam bashing and threads like this one ensures everybody knows that GOG has started selling and what has GOG done in regard of marketing for this? One twitter post and one post on their forum. Simply put the timing appears to have allowed them to conquer a market overnight without marketing expenses. This is why I said GOG would start to sell VN now despite never having made that claim before. Timing is everything.

I agree but it depends on what you mean by 'a lot of time'. As I'm not into BnHA and didn't start SG0 yet I would place it on the level of Fall2015 but my fave remains spring 2013, while the next season (summer 2018) seems indecent on promising animes... Still this season benefit also from ongoing winter2018's shows like saiki no psi-nan, 7tsu no taizai, etc. Yup it's like we have a good anime episode every day, it's a bliss ! About Hinamatsuri it's so refreshing, it's as if seinen + comedy > school + comedy.

Hey, I work for Sekai Project. I just wanted to chime in and mention that aside from Sunrider and Fault, we'll be bringing more of our titles to the platform over time. While we probably won't be offering our full catalog on there, we're looking forward to working with them. We actually announced this partnership at AWA last September, so we're excited to finally start selling our games on this platform!

Thoughts? With Steam's latest fiasco, which clearly undermines their credibility as a publishing platform for both large studios and indie devs, GOG might have found their potential chance to expand their market share. In all honesty, this is great news, considering how reluctant so far they have been in regards to vns. I doubt we'll see 18+ games released anytime soon if ever, but if that happens and GOG actually bothers to create a well managed market with decent control over what content gets published, it might as well turn into a new dawn for both western and japanese developers. Not to mention GOG falls under polish jurisdiction, which means a lot more lenient and reasonable laws regarding what can and cannot be published in terms of potential 18+ content.

This looks opportunistic of gog because of the timing, but it's my understanding that this has been in the works for a while. SP actually announced ages ago that they were entering into a partnership with gog to sell stuff on their store. The timing is largely coincidental, though I wouldn't be surprised if there was an early rollout to capitalize on the current events.

I'm glad you reviewed this one, I enjoyed it a lot when I first played it and it's still among my favorite games. c:

To answer your question from earlier in the comment thread - only a demo was released for NaNoRenO. However, if I remember right this was always the intention of the devs, so it wasn't so much that they bit off more than they could chew and were forced to downsize, just that they used NaNo as their starting point.

I agree that all of these are great VNs, and the developers all deserve to be on it, but I would have preferred a little bit more variety, especially for such a short list. It's a little harder to get away with being on the list twice when there are only 5 spots. Loan Wolf by Rumblebee, and Plain by Fablesoft, for example, are two that I personally enjoyed and think could have potentially competed with the others on this list for a spot. Some others that I haven't played myself but have heard good things about are Blossoms Bloom Brightest, Girl Crush, and Love on the Peacock Express.

I don't personally think it's about the market getting big in itself, since the appeal of the medium is small enough that it's clearly never going to hold a candle to the major sellers on either Steam or GOG. However, GOG have already had some success as an outlet for Japanese games (Tokyo Xanadu was a chart-topper there despite being a fairy mediocre title), and visual novels have an overlapping market with such Japanese titles. If I had to guess, then, part of the point is to be visibly welcoming to a certain demographic, while also indirectly snubbing Steam. It's poor "optics" with respect to some of the population, but if GOG are betting on the idea that those people (approving of censorship, and so forth) are more likely to be Steam-loyal than to share their no-DRM ideology, then it would be quite a strong way of boosting their presence as a freer and more consumer-friendly alternative, in the business of giving all customers their desired product without putting unnecessary obstacles in their way. So, they get to increase their appeal to the Japanese-content-loving demographic, and also increase their appeal to the libertarian demographic (more or less their core), at the same time. Win-win for them, really.

People love to harass things they don't understand. That's all there is to it, really.

Can confirm. Don't get me wrong, I'm not romantically interested in my sister (especially since she's 13 years younger than me), but I do enjoy incest in anime.

I'll probably get laughed at this, and I'm soooo late to the party, but I'm watching Sailor Moon. Currently I'm near the end of final season (Sailor Stars), 12 episodes left. When it aired originally I didn't like it at all - partly due to horrible translation that our TV used. Now I'm watching with english subs - and it's surprisingly good. And the music is totally amazing - actually it was the music that made me to finally watch it - I listened to songs, and loved them, so decided to give anime a try. It's the first anime I'm watching after veeery long break - when I was a kid, in the early '90s, our TV aired some vintage series from '70s and '80s - like Toushou Daimos, Captain Tsubasa, Time Bokkan, Paul no Miracle Daisakusen, Tiger Mask - most of them were Italian dubs, mind you - and that was my last contact with the medium. Probably thanks to this (being left out of the loop), I'm still able to appreciate Sailor Moon PS Ami-chan best girl!

Now that I have confirmation from Dergonu that the game he was playing is not VN of the Month quality (he has stalled on it), I will move on to finally announcing VN of the Month for March and April. March March was a decent month, since it had three potential candidates for VN of the Month. Those candidates are: Butterfly Seeker AI Love Unjou no Fairy Tale Now, despite my rating of it, I'm going to go ahead and disqualify AI Love. Why? Because it is essentially a borderline nukige. It made its way onto my Chicken Soup for the Soul list, but, as I've stated in the past, that isn't necessarily an indication of kamige status. Rather, it is an indication of how good the game is at soothing and relieving non-violent stress. So, this comes down to Unjou no Fairy Tale versus Butterfly Seeker. Based purely on my personal tastes, I'd probably go for Unjou no Fairy Tale, since I'm an admitted fantasy addict... but in the end, I had to (reluctantly) admit that Butterfly Seeker was the better VN. The depth of the story, the characters, and even just the details of the important events was such that I couldn't honestly give Unjou no Fairy Tale the victory for VN of the Month, March 2018. My reasons for excluding Etatoto from the final running are... that fun2novel's own review and private comments didn't leave me with the impression of VN of the Month quality. Worth reading for a certain portion of the community? Yes. Worthy of being recommended on a larger scale... no. April Having dropped Taiju for the moment (SofthouseChara's newest SLG), I was left with only one viable candidate for April... Yuusha to Maou, to Majo no Cafe. This is perhaps the weakest VN of the Month candidate I've put up in quite some time, but it still easily won over Kari Gurashi Ren'ai, which is the only other game that hit my baseline standard. Naming it as VN of the Month, April 2018 actually troubles me a bit... given a choice, I wish that Unjou or AI Love had been released in April so I'd have a better candidate. I almost decided not to name one for this month, but I reluctantly decided that it meets standards.

I didn't say it as a bad thing. It's more like an objective observation. I have nothing against people or companies profiting as long as it's without exploitation of people and I see no signs of exploitation here. I'm quite sure GOG didn't plan this. Just think about what we know. Some VN companies have tried to get GOG to sell VNs. This will most likely have provided GOG with contact info like direct phone numbers to CEOs. GOG will also most likely have playtested the VNs themselves during past negotiations, hence having a pretty good idea what it's all about. Now Valve messed up and the English VN market is free for the taking. Odds are that whoever comes first will get the majority of the market, possibly even close to monopoly. In other words other companies had provided GOG with the means to add VNs to the store in a matter of days and they might have been in that situation for quite a while. Valve then basically said "act now" and they did. Seems like it's the company version of getting the winning Lotto numbers. If GOG planned this, it would mean they somehow managed to make Valve act like idiots, hence some sort of corruption. I really don't think that's the case because I can't really see GOG acting like that and even if they did, I don't see how they could do it. Besides Valve have on multiple occasions revealed that they are able to make stupid decisions without external help. GOG was just at the right place at the right time and they knew how to make the best of it, but they did not have control of the reason why it was the right time or even if the right time would ever turn up.

One possible logical reason is that this is a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity. Personally, I see little reason to pass this great opportunity up as it will probably not appear again Anyway it's great news for us; DRM and discrimination-free Visual Novels? YAH!

FHA is a combination of all 3 routes in FSN, but it felt a bit more like Carnival Phantasm for the most part, and thus more of a fan disc than an actual sequel. This is in contrast to Meikyuu and Rauken, since Meikyuu has short after-stories for each heroine and the "Grand route" (aka the true route), while Rauken continues where the Grand route in Meikyuu left off without any side-stories (though it does have a prologue and epilogue, but I digress).

Finally finished ef - the fairy tale of the two. Interesting read ....... that managed to gut punch me in the feels harder then anything I've ever read. Emotionally, I was almost destroyed... At least the Shindou twins are my favorite twins. Both Kei and Chihiro were great. I think I need a read that is a bit more light hearted for now

Expert level commercials

I can only agree, I had expectations because of the VN, but the anime is really bad, I had a hard time not droping season 1 (though I liked the opening song of the 2nd part) and couldn't go over 2nd ep of s2. But I wouldn't put it on worst anime ever seen. Hand Shakers is a more formidable concurrent. Ousama game and on the same note Mayoiga are even better (or even worst, it depends), I guarantee 100% disappointment. Ultimately I tried things like pupa, and mars of destruction. This last one is unwatchable, even for fun. Even if it's a single OVA of 19min don't try it, you have been warned. On my personal tastes I would also list : Akane Maniax : those who watched Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien, found Akane kinda cute, and tried this, will know what I mean... Chaos Child : I had a hard time with Chaos Head but on the whole it was watchable, but not Chaos Child.

Hey, great news! I use GOG for games, so it'll be cool to see powerpoints in there too! Regional price never bothered me as I always wait for sales anyway. And this was in the MG blog, maybe just to spice news up or a tease that 18+ games with patches will be there too in the future. Wow, found the answer a minute later on GOG's twitter:

This is how anime becomes real.

I think you have synesthesia

Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read? New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time. Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ? Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect. I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book. Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child. As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory. VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it. Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

if anything i am dumber now and starting to enjoy seeing the same 3 stories told over and over

Gotta love the classic standards of "explicit violence is just fine, but depictions of our own unclothed bodies is sick and wrong"...