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Hello there and welcome to the new iteration of my humble blog! Pride of the West was created, apart from fueling my personal megalomania, for a very specific goal: promoting and demystifying OELVNs within the Fuwa community, fighting the negative stereotypes and ridicule attached to them in minds of the many more JP-centric VN fans. For the last six months, I've spent countless hours exploring the EVN scene and channelling my impressions into the blog (with what I personally see as a very positive and encouraging response). I was, however, never really satisfied with the brand I've come up with last year and this was one of the problems that became apparent while my project became more fleshed out and grew in size, with attachments such as the Steam Curation and Twitter account. The second issue that became clear over time was the limitations of the Forums blogging tool, which guaranteed certain visibility, but gave me very little control over my own content and was shared between a large number of people, with only that much space for all of them in that little side-tab. For all these reasons, I've decided to go forward with some (long-coming) changes, the most important ones being establishing the external version of the blog and changing the name of the whole project to (slightly generic, but much less pretentious) EVN Chronicles. I've also moved the Steam Curator page to a new address, sadly being forced to forgo my previous, humble following in the process, but with the hope that the new setup can bring much more with time. So, as I've explained what's happening, I would like you to encourage you to: --> Check out (and consider following) EVN Chronicles' external site --> Follow my new Steam Curator page --> Follow me on Twitter for blog updates and various VN-related news Apart from setting up the blog, I've worked this week to bring you a new review format - Shovelware Adventures - in which I will go through notorious OELVN shovelware and give it semi-humorous assessments. The first post in this style will appear later today, both on Fuwa and the new site. For the time being, the Fuwanovel version of the blog will be updated along with the new one, while the external blog will also feature slightly-redacted reposts of the old reviews and posts along with announcements I wouldn't post here to avoid clogging the sidebar (those might appear on the blog's thread in the member's lounge). However, after a week, I will be cutting every new Fuwa post into a teaser version and adding a link to the external blog. Same will happen to the old posts, as they are gradually re-published on the new site. I hope you'll follow me in this new stage of my VN journey and have a lovely weekend everyone!

On a few occasions I’ve stated that I do now wish to give too much space to bad OELVNs, as it goes directly against the idea behind this blog: showing the real value within the Western VN industry and disproving negative stereotypes held by JP-oriented readers (and people less familiar with the formula altogether). There’s, however, no way to reasonably deny that the OELVN scene is full of games of questionable quality – many of which I, as someone exploring all corners and shady alleys of the VN world, end up playing. And while a large number, maybe even a majority of those games can be excused for their failures, considering they’re purely amateur, freeware projects (such as quickly-put-together game jam entries), many other are commercial products that, by the sheer fact of asking money from their audience, are fully open for scrutiny and even straight up shaming, if they deserve that. This new format will be focused on the exactly that kind of games – titles from most notorious, shovelware-spewing developers and all kinds of unfortunate, misguided failures that plague the OELVN industry. Torturing the games and their creators is not my main intention though – I want to both keep a lighthearted tone in my coverage and not forgot the humour, intentional or not, that can be found in bad games. For this reason, the mini-reviews presented will be at best semi-serious and to make that point clear, they’ll be made using a custom, 3-point scoring system: Golden Poo: Awarded to games that, while still definitely bad in many aspects, are either amusing with their absurdity or present some kind of trashy charm that make them, in certain contexts, a worthy experience. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

This is the latest kinetic novel based in the setting created by the 'Uso' series by Campus. The name of this VN says a lot about how it begins - the name means 'How we began our calculating love-comedy'. The protagonist, a young man who managed to pay off his parents' massive debt through hard work after their deaths, comes to Mahoshi Gakuen in order to find a rich girl to marry. This is in part because he is actively suspicious of romantic inclinations due to the fact that his hopelessly inept parents were from rich families and eloped because of opposition from both sides (and he saw his misery as a child being caused by his parents' decision to take love over wealth). Despite this, he is essentially a good person... and intelligent, despite frequently making facepalm-worthy decisions and taking facepalm-worthy actions in pursuit of his gold-digging goal. He approaches Teidou Shirayuki (a younger relative of Setsuka from the Uso series) and is rebuffed harshly... but his experiences in life have left him more than a little psychologically tough, so he decides to continue pursuing her. It is then that he is approached her maid, Sakura Nono, who offers her help in his plans... Just to get this out in the open for people who aren't fans of nontraditional or unconventional relationships (or those who are), this VN is a 3P romance story, and it is typical of this series for bucking the common trends in VN romance in a few little ways (that I won't spoil for you). After I got over wanting to bury my head in my hands over the protagonist's actions in the prologue, I quickly took a shine to the three main characters and their odd little relationship (and it just gets more odd as time goes by). The protagonist's overconfident attitude and endless optimism about his own capabilities (sometimes justified, sometimes not) is frequently a source for humor, and seeing Shirayuki's cold attitude melt away is a true pleasure to watch. While Nono frequently takes on a sidekick like role, she still manages to be a solid heroine in her own right, with her possessing almost as much affection for Shirayuki as she does for the protagonist (this is true of Shirayuki as well). Despite its premise, this game actually manages to be much more believable in some ways than other VNs with a romantic focus, and that is a huge positive, at least in my view. I love the relationship building in this game (both before and after the required and omnipresent 'confession scene'), and I came away from this game feeling some of the built-up negative feelings from playing so many charage with almost identical romances shaved away.

I'll say this first off... this game actually needed locked paths or a true ending. Like most Windmill games, the character interactions are pretty heavily reliant on easygoing manzai humor and running character personality and behavior jokes (in fact, most VN humor is based on that). This game has a cast of four writers (one amateur, one h-scene specialist, and two established names), including Imashina Rio (Gin'iro Haruka and Hoshi Ori Yume Mirai) and Kagami Yuu (ef, Eden*, and Mirai Nostalgia). Unfortunately, the styles of the two main writers are extremely different, and it is rather blatant when things shift... sometimes in the middle of scenes (this can be jarring and disturbs the flow at times). Understand, I started out liking this game... I like non-city settings (for some reason, city locales always end up being multi-date ichaicha fests even for heroines who wouldn't be interested in that kind of thing), and the interactions with the heroines and side-characters were amusing. I even still liked how things were going early in my first heroine path (Serina), but after I headed into a second path, it became apparent they were abusing the 'osananajimi is scared of friend group falling apart' trope. Oh, the way they abused it is different in each path, but the abuse is so rampant that I had to wince. Worse, the characters have these pretty much useless powers that only work on each other. All the paths have the powers as part of the central conflict, but, considering how little the characters seemed to care about their powers in the common route (one way or the other) it felt unnatural how they became central in the actual heroine routes. Understand, I'm a fantasy freak, so characters having powers is (of course) fine with me... what bothered me was the artificial-feeling limitations and the way the characters so blithely accepted a revelation midway through the path that would have turned most games a bit gloomy. Again, what's worse is that this was seemingly only utilized conveniently to explain why the other girls (all of whom are latently in love with the protagonist) stop pursuing him once you get on a particular heroine path. I will say the way they did it was mildly funny (the pseudo-yuri in Himari's path was lol-worthy for instance), but it felt very, very forced to me. Another issue is that Rinka is rather blatantly the main heroine (the scene I mentioned above makes that very clear). As a result, all the other paths proceed without resolving the issue of just why that certain event and the issues it brought to the surface came into being. Of course, as a result, Rinka's path is a very obvious 'true path' and blows away all the others in terms of quality (and length), drawing on elements from the other paths that hinted around the edges about what is revealed in Rinka's path. Anyone who plays this game should either only play Rinka's path or play the other paths first (like I did). While the paths other than Rinka's have some serious issues (the biggest one being choppy pacing and poor use of the setting elements and plot devices), Rinka's path and the common route are definitely worth playing. Sadly, I can't recommend this one for VN of the Month, but if you want a mildly funny plot-centric charage (yes, they coexist at times), this is a decent choice.