mbl

Song of Saya is technically a romance

Never be the same, but I survived!

twist ending =/= mystery. If you liked utawarerumono and haven't played Tears to Tiara, that's a game for you. It's another tactical RPG with a similarly world-breaking ending.

I like this thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoS9MDJphYM

Trap her in my computer and force her to do all the vocals for any crappy musics I write

The same could be said for their anime/manga counterparts.

Were you trying to bait out hate and win the thread or something? I'm skeptical that someone could claim this without realizing how silly it sounds. In the olden days, back when you didn't have an endless list of games to occupy your time, a game being a daunting task to complete was considered a good thing.

Porn with no plot or story is generally what the American crowd considers dating sims to be. "Aching Dreams" and "Transylvania Girls (Non-H)" are the only ones that come to mind with actual plot.

bacon and more bacon just piles and piles of bacon

I'd recommend most newgrounds dating-sims over Huniepop, just listed it because I knew people would come in suggesting it(as they did). I thought I'd made my distaste for it clearer in my first post than I actually did.

Pretty much every VN people constantly talk about being great on here really isn't all that good.

^ These are the tops, you can play both in-browser along with "May Club", another retro DS, on http://tss.asenheim.org/ Otherwise there's "Kingdom", which has a lot of content but progresses really slowly with not much you can do to speed things up. There's also the recently released "Huniepop", which some people consider a dating sim... If you like match-three puzzles have a go. Plus there's the countless flash games on newgrounds.

And I still haven't even properly started Toradora portable... Really need to catch up with these PSP releases.

steak, potatoes, and eggs.

I can generally handle a bad translation if the story being told is acceptably good, there's only a couple of VNs I can think of where the translation was disgusting to the point of being unreadable. The most common reason I'll have for dropping a VN is that I've read the exact story it is telling before; Japan loves to rehash the same story 1000 times, usually with the exact same character tropes/designs and nothing changing but the art style.

lol I still have G430s for if I really need to have a built-in mic. If that's the level of audio quality you are looking for, you can buy good under $100 models from most reputable companies. As others have said, Sennheiser and Audio-Technica generally have the best quality mid-grade gear. If you're a PC gamer, you could also think of having a separate mic and thus get out of shopping in the shitty realm of 'gaming headsets'.

I trade my soul for lord cthulhu

When talking about VNs, I'd agree with most of what you say. Conventions like character customization aren't even helpful outside of pure RPGs, where players are meant to identify with their PC and act on the gameworld through that avatar. I always find it silly to see VNs and even manga containing faceless/voiceless protagonists as if they are writing in a format where the viewers identifying with a particular character is important, and there are many other illogical conventions many otaku writers follow that really leave me confused about otaku culture.

Story is obviously most important, but I voted gameplay due the fact that there are many VNs I still replay to this day even though I have seen all their content because I love the gameplay. If you're capable of adding gameplay with the story, why wouldn't you? The PC vs Flash vs VN engine thing is pointless, of course people are going to prefer a stable PC game engine over flash... it seems like it would be more trouble to develop a full game in flash than with a proper game engine, or even better a VN specific engine. If you're having gameplay, then use a game engine like Unity or develop your own, otherwise there is no reason not to use a VN engine. The last question seems similarly pointless, as the way you release the story depends on the type of story you intend to tell. If the focus is on one major plot arch then it is best to have it all developed at the time of release, if you feel it is much work for one release you can split it into a trilogy. If it is a character based story you can tell it in an episodic format, and your release schedule for episodes depends on you.