Fred the Barber

Wow, after just finishing spending a ton of time with the game, I hate the way it looks with your graphics changes, lol. I mean, I can see where you're coming from saying it's an improvement, especially on the night shot of Mayuri and Suoh in bed, but I got so involved with the game that I'm too much on the side of the current stuff fitting the feel of the story. That said, when it does the fade-in-from-white thing, it can definitely be too bright even for my preferences, for several seconds.

Flowers -Le Volume sur Printemps- https://www.jastusa.com/flowers-spring.html Summary Surrounded by immense walls in the middle of a forest, lies the prestigious all-girls school, Saint Angraecum Academy. It's a school that prides itself on growing bright and cultured young women. The academy's special Amitié program is designed to help foster new friendships among students that will last a lifetime. This is why Suoh Shirahane, a painfully shy girl with a mysterious past, has enrolled. As her first year of high school begins, she is filled with hopes of a new life. Follow Suoh as she navigates her new friendships and attempts to unravel the many mysteries at the academy, including occult rituals and the mysterious disappearance of fellow students. As spring warms into summer, so do friendships until they blossom into something more. Suoh's heart opens for the first time, but is it okay to like a girl? Ending Guideline / Suggested Route Order Route Guideline Mayuri Kohsaka Good End Bad End Rikka Hanabishi Good End Attribution Summary and image from the game's official site, http://flowersgame.com Walkthrough created by @Fred the Barber

Strong suggestion: don't waste time practicing reading flashcards, just practice writing from memory. You'll find that if you can do the writing, your brain is perfectly happy to reverse it for you automagically, but the other way around doesn't happen at all. Perversely, it'll be faster and easier to learn how to read by just learning how to write. Same for katakana and kanji.

Confession: I'm in the middle of a two-week vacation, of which 20% will be spent in the tropics and 80% will be spent with eroge.

I'll second G-Senjou no Maou, and I'll add Sekien no Inganock. Both are at times emotional, and both avoid a lot of the cliches of a typical VN. I also think both of them may have what you mean when you ask for challenging the reader, though admittedly I tend to read less dark material overall, so I might have a different bar for that than most. That said, the Dramatical Murder reference has me thinking in some other directions entirely, but unfortunately not directions I've explored personally (I haven't played Dramatical Murder, for starters, nor anything remotely close to it). As the others have suggested, if you can link a VNDB page with your votes, that might help us offer better recommendations.

So, I actually have read Corona Blossom vol. 1, and agree with Narcosis's assessment: it's pretty mediocre. It is certainly cute, but it didn't even tell me a complete story, and it didn't lure me in enough to be all that interested in the story it was telling. I actually like short kinetic novels, even episodic ones, and even ones that are basically moege. I thoroughly enjoyed Karakara; I liked WEE 1 and 2 and am looking forward to 3; and I thought SupiPara was okay and shows promise to be great. CoroBlo was a step below any of those.

Hajimemashite. Chou otaku desu.

As a result of one of my more questionable recent life choices, I've found myself playing KoiRizo. Only played maybe an hour so far, but a few things stand out so far: The intro feels a lot less artificial than I was expecting given the description and my expectations for subsequent content. It's pretty cute. I like the soundtrack. Latin-influenced music is a soft spot of mine, but is sadly very rare in VNs; I think the last time I heard any was Fal's theme in Symphonic Rain. It's a little out of place right now, but I'm betting it'll fit the game like a glove once the setting changes. I may actually be a Pulltop fan and just didn't realize it until now. Shame about MoeNovel...

With that misunderstanding, I believe you have just made a friend for life out of Tiago.

They announced Sorcery Jokers as well as Sona-Nyl, which I think are pretty firmly in this category. I expect you're right and such games are mostly a combination of loss leaders and passion projects for them. But I suspect they're also, to a lesser extent, risky investments: the opportunity cost is high and the payout so far has always been low, but chuuni titles have the potential to appeal to a different market than do the nukige and moege that dominate the western VN scene. If they can successfully tap a new market with a game like Sorcery Jokers, say by pulling a bunch of chuuni anime watchers into their fold, it could be a pretty big win for MG.

Purely anecdotally, I at least never felt particularly interested in Noble Works, but the video trailer for Senren Banka really caught my eye, to the point that it even has a moderately high place in my mental list of titles I'd like to see localized. And on the data side of things, it's got just enough VNDB scores to be statistically significant, and they're pretty damn good.

I could swear I'd heard Portuguese spoken before, but now I'm not so certain. In my mind it was slightly funny Spanish, but what I heard sounded much farther from Spanish and closer to French than I expected. When are you going to continue your Tiag Plays X-Com series?

Successful shitposting in CoC is a good way to earn more likes than posts on Fuwa, but the best way is to post translation status updates. Ironically, given the nature of the site, the way to lose at the like-to-post ratio game is to get actively involved in the VN discussion threads. But I'm as guilty of perpetuating this state as anyone - I like a lot of posts the "post pics you like" thread.

Granted, but you can't interact with anything, only observe events as they pass by. I wish I learned faster.

But that's not even funny, whereas the original was hilarious:

The problem with Corona Blossom isn't that it's weeaboo — it's that it doesn't have much plot, and what little it has is incomplete. Now, as far as the problem with Corona Blossom's sales, who can say for sure, but I imagine people could tell that the plot is thin from the promo materials, and the people who actually heard about it care about that (i.e., the NekoPara crowd didn't get hold of it). You can draw a big contrast between it and the recently-released-in-a-similar-situation SupiPara. Like Corona Blossom volume 1, SupiPara chapter 1 was pretty much fluff its whole way through, but with SupiPara there are signs that something bigger is going on, and its ending starts to put those plot devices to use in ways that make you want to read more. The SupiPara ending wraps up the initial fluffy story in a clear, satisfactory way, and very nicely sets the stage for the next chapter with a small teaser. In contrast, Corona Blossom resolves nothing, choosing to end on a huge cliffhanger rather than a resolved story + a teaser for another one. It ends up feeling like somebody chopped a book in half and handed you the first half, rather than like someone actually planned a story that could meaningfully be released in pieces.

Glad you're enjoying Gahkthun. I enjoyed Gahkthun quite a bit, but Inganock is really a cut above. I keep not making time to go read Sharin, though... As for me, currently reading Flowers.

True, I usually read Fuwa sitting down. Next person can't read.

I see. So, from the final scene of chapter 1 it definitely looked like they were going towards dealing with his mother's situation next, but I guess they're doing that in the context of Amano's route. And, the fact that the most important heroine hasn't been introduced yet is also mentioned in that teaser scene at the end. Kind of a strange decision, but I guess between the memory loss and the time loopiness, it seems kinda fitting.

True. I make em with half buckwheat, half regular flour, and lots of butter. Delicious. Next person likes their coffee like they like their women.

Just wrapped this up. Still working out how I feel about it, but mostly positive. I thoroughly enjoyed the ending, and, after the post-game teaser, I'm looking forward to the next chapter. On that topic, @littleshogun, why do you think Hotaru is the next chapter? It seemed pretty clear from that scene that Ryouko will be the next chapter's focus (which I'm actually pretty pumped about). Even though this chapter was super fluffy, the events at the end perfectly set the path for a much less fluffy remainder to the game. I feel like this game is on the road to being a real heartrending new classic in true minori spirit. I'm excited enough that I'm considering gifting a few copies just to raise the counter at http://mangagamer.org/minori/ a little bit... Breakdown by area: The art is freaking gorgeous, of course, though I'll echo @ChaosRaven's statement about Ryouko's facial expressions looking pretty janky. Sakura also had one pose where it looked like her head had been scrunched down a little. But, yeah, everything is so glowy... it's really lovely, IMO. I only nitpick because everything else was so amazing that it's a little disappointing to be unable to call it simply perfect. The music is honestly pretty lackluster. It's not the worst I've heard, but it's really not great. I suggest turning down the BGM volume a fair bit. The story, like I said, is mostly really fluffy, but there's a lot of foreshadowing and interesting setup (which didn't feel clumsy or annoying to read or anything like that). So, even though this chapter didn't have much in the way of surprises, I feel like the broader arc is going places. I love a good nakige, and if we do ever get all of SupiPara, I'm willing to bet it will go straight to the top of my "best nakige" list. Characters were initially iffy to me, but they really grew on me. Amano is the best example: I couldn't pin her down for a while, to such an extent that I couldn't even think of her as a human; she was just a really weird trope. But after enough time with her, I started to pick up more subtle shades of personality and started to appreciate her more; she kind of turned out like Ami from ToraDora (one of the few redeeming characteristics of that show). And while, as a character, Sakura is pretty flat, with all the others, I felt like they were gradually deepening the more I read about them. In the end, Momiji is best girl for me, by miles, but all the rest are interesting too. Ironically, I thought Sakura was best girl initially because she's so bright and shiny, but I think she dropped from the top of the rankings all the way to the bottom by the time I was done, just because she didn't really change or grow. She was at her best in the first five minutes, and was all downhill from there. The translation is fine, if a little verbose for my taste, especially in the dialogue. I've found I have a tendency to screenshot three things: lines I find really clunky, lines that I find really funny, and cute girls. SupiPara was weighted most heavily towards cute girls, followed by funny lines, followed by lines that should be improved. So, all in all, I shouldn't really complain here (though, you know, I probably still will, a little bit).

I was starting to think I was weird for generally not caring for the SupiPara music, when most other people seemed to be praising it. Glad to hear I'm not alone on that feeling... On the other hand, the Majo Koi Nikki soundtrack is fantastic, so at least I've got that going for me, among the games I'm currently spending time with. Agreed with both of you, though: the music can easily make or break a game, especially if I'm already on the fence about it otherwise. It certainly broke Princess Evangile for me.

False. I read it for the story, and stayed for the story, and eventually found out along the way that the porn could be rather enjoyable as well. Next person spends more time on Facebook than on Twitter.

I agree with literally everything in this post. That doesn't happen very often.

Another vote for the WAB series / Steampunk series. I'd recommend Inganock as a starting point. Also, bats's VA-11 Hall-A suggestion is a good one, and a little more off the beaten path.