Fred the Barber

Heh. Yeah, I'm also looking forward to Autumn, since my character ranking is pretty close to yours, including finding those top four far and away more interesting than all of the rest. I agree with a lot of the stuff that bothered you, especially not finding either the giant pile of choices or the mysteries to be a pleasant experience. The way both the melodramas and the romance all played out felt oddly real to me, though, especially in comparison to basically every VN I've ever read. It's no storybook romance, and it's frankly rather unsatisfying to read about as a result, hence why I've been advising people to stay away from it if they're looking for romance, but it is nonetheless somehow very believable. At any rate, I was in it for the melodrama, so it ended up with 4/5 for me, but I'm completely unsurprised to see people who don't enjoy that shit (and, really, most people don't; there's probably something wrong with me) giving it a rating like yours.

I'm finally getting started on the great journey; I watched the first two episodes of Bakemonogatari. Initial impression: what is going on and why is it so amazing. Looking forward to the rest.

What's the point of releasing something in volumes if a volume is individually unsatisfying? There are countless examples of this being done effectively — for instance, pretty much every light novel in existence. Or in the VN world, look at SupiPara, which has a neat, fully-contained story for Volume 1 and sets the stage for future volumes, or Flowers. Hence why I recommend at least waiting for all the volumes to come out, and even then holding out to see what more people are saying about it, since it's frankly not looking too promising so far.

You're a monster.

For a slightly different perspective: Corona Blossom is a below-average VN, and volume 1 ends on a cliffhanger without resolving anything at all in the plot. It might be an average game when it's complete, though I kind of doubt it given how it's going, but I definitely wouldn't recommend playing just volume 1. Looking at my VNDB ratings, it's in the 20th percentile of games I've played. Pretty bad, honestly, but I mostly avoid bad games in the first place, so I guess if your bar is really low, maybe you'll like it?

I actually fetishize people who have fetishes.

Her?

I've continued to use Tenso despite them adding that rule. They continue to blithely mail my eroge on to me.

Time for Harmonia?

That's the point.

You should join us.

Sometimes, I feel like reading a nukige and will pick one up just for the H. I've played two at this point, and am currently playing a third, and I've found that them having a coherent and interesting plot and characters makes them vastly more interesting to read. For instance, I disliked ImoPara in many ways; would not play again. Even the wafer-thin plot of Ultimate Boob Wars put it head and shoulders above ImoPara. And I'm actually really enjoying Funbag Fantasy right now, which I picked up because I kinda felt like having another nukige under my belt, so to speak, and because people were saying the story is actually relatively interesting and humorous, for a nukige. So, basically, even when I'm playing a game nominally for the H scenes, I've found that the rest of the game being good makes it way more worth it. Now, all that said, most of the time, I'll pick up a VN based on things like story, characters, and setting. When that's what I'm looking for, I'll usually play the version of a game with H scenes if given options, on the off-chance that they're actually worth going back to later (and I'll repeat what others have said: scene replay is fundamental, not just CG gallery, for the enjoyment some people get out of H scenes), but almost always I find they get in the way more than they add while I'm reading. There are rare exceptions. Sekien no Inganock is an especially good example of one, where I felt the sex scenes were a fundamental and worthwhile part of the story being told, especially in how they were essential to understanding the characters and their relationships. With Majo Koi Nikki, I'm kind of on the fence about whether they need to be there; the sex is fundamental to the story, plot-wise, but perhaps not the H scenes, since I don't know that they do much of interest to advance characters. So, arguably the sex doesn't need to happen on-stage, and it in fact does usually feel like it gets in the way of progressing the story while I'm reading it. So, I most likely would enjoy the game more without them, and they were indeed cut for a Vita release, probably to the benefit of the game experience. And, yes, if you have H, animated H is a definite plus, IMO.

I think my version of that is "remember your anxiety about that service you maintain at work that some dude made a year ago and then left the team and nobody has given a shit about ever since, and you joined the team a few months ago and haven't had time to clean it all up yet, so it's probably about to literally cause the datacenter to burn down? Let's wake you up at 2 AM so you can fret some more about it." Based on his post, I feel like Tiag and I would get along great in person. But the reality is we'd probably both just sit there awkwardly and not talk about anything at all.

I feel like I have a tendency to recommend Sekien no Inganock to everybody, but I think that's only because it's under-recommended to people who would likely enjoy it. So, yeah. Take a look at Sekien no Inganock. I think it's got what you're looking for.

You don't really get clubs, do you. Edit: I wonder how many hundreds of pages I'd need to go back to find a near-identical conversation a year ago about the astronomy club...

I have never seen a better summary of why Flutterz has difficulty making friends than this right here. Did you, umm... talk to anybody?

Yeah, I'm liking Zestiria when I can find the time to play it. Berseria is apparently amazing, at least, so in the near future, there'll be that.

Yeah, like I said in my review, it's an episodic sequence of melodramas much more so than a romance. The fanservice is at its heaviest in the middle of the game, probably? And the romance is heaviest at the end, though even then, I didn't feel like it was a focus. But the story is mostly a melodrama.

That looks so wrong, and I don't even know shit for Japanese. Katakana or bust.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about the fanservice. Like Decay, I would've rather they toned it down a bit, but I can kind of understand the line they're treading here. As is abundantly clear from the review, my gold standard for "relationship-oriented melodramas about Japanese all-girl Catholic high schools" is MariMite, which Flowers shares a lot of similarities with, but the biggest differences between the two are the physical nature of the relationships and, correspondingly, the amount of sexual content depicted. MariMite is extremely minimal (except sometimes in the ED videos, I suppose, if I'm being perfectly honest...), and always respectful about it (again, except the ED videos...), and I love that (and, who am I kidding, I kinda like the fanservicey ED videos too). Since the focus of the drama in that show isn't sexual relationships (except in exactly one case), the show pretty much doesn't show any kind of sexual relationship (except in, surprise surprise, that exact same case). Now with Flowers, in contrast, they actually were trying to tell a story about sexual, romantic relationships. So I get why there was a need for the main character to periodically reflect on her sexual attraction to the people around her. But the story and the characters are still very innocent, so it isn't going to go tread into full-on H-scene territory, and I respect that (though I expect I'm in the minority in this forum...). But to be completely frank, nobody will read this and then seriously argue that even a single thing that happens in the ballet room is anything less than pure, gratuitous fanservice. Edit: I forgot to answer @akaritan's question. Currently plan is for this to be a regular gig, not a one-off, but it mostly depends on me finding the time. I'll do my best to make time for it, though, since people have been quite supportive.

http://fuwanovel.net/reviews/2016/09/19/flowers-le-volume-sur-printemps/ Of course I didn't just choose that header image because it was a little racy. How could you even suggest that?

Reviving this to point out another reason why you might want to keep the JP quotation marks: it turns out at least one VN engine is abominably stupid and keys off the JP quotation marks, rather than the presence of a speaker (or some other annotation, whatever, I don't care), to decide that a line is dialog and should be indented accordingly in the backlog display. Just ran across this in a KiriKiri game, so it may even be universal to KiriKiri. When I tried removing the outer JP quotation marks, the backlog immediately went from looking quite nice to looking like garbage. Was a pretty depressing experience, honestly, since now I have to go put them all back...

Now that sounds relevant to my interests. Every five years or so I pick up one of them and am always disappointed to find it so same-y. Feels like every time they add a new type (if you're lucky), a handful new moves, a giant pile of new pokemon, and basically call it done. Not what I'm looking for. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I really want them to shake things up a bit and make it feel a little different.

Swan Song is probably the most up your alley. I think you'll find the mysteries in Flowers more frustrating than anything; I considered them a negative to the game, not just because of my personal tastes but also because I felt they were often executed pretty poorly.

Bad marketing is worse than no marketing. The time I decided to link Gahkthun to a normie audience, I spent about 20 minutes writing a disclaimer to the effect of "despite all the porn on this website, this game is not porn, and don't judge me or it based on that". Now I don't even bother.