Fred the Barber

Welcome! Let us know what kind of content you like, and we can likely provide better recommendations - comedy? romance? "feels"? sci-fi? You get the idea. Also, consider making an account on https://vndb.org/ and linking it from your Fuwanovel profile, since it makes it easier to give more targeted recommendations for things you haven't already played. As far as a generic recommendation, you can't go wrong with Steins;Gate, although I think that one does have a Vita release so maybe you've already played it. Hmm. Maybe G-Senjou no Maou - it's also a good introductory VN.

I'm pretty sure you only get one kamikaze technique.

Confession: I still haven't played Huniepop.

Just finished Steins;Gate for the March reading club. The phone choice system is pretty annoying, but the rest of the game is more or less perfect. I was surprised at how nearly identical it was to what I recall from the anime (normally, VN adaptations have to diverge pretty heavily), but the VN having side-routes makes a huge difference in the world. Each one really increased the impact of the main route alternative and gave a great feeling of closure for the associated character, as well as reliably providing a meaningful and solid ending to the story in its own right. The anime is way up there on my list of favorites, so with the VN coming out even better, it ended up basically at the top of my list. I don't want to dissect this one too much, because the whole experience doesn't feel like something I can break down easily. I will say that there were lots of tears; probably more than for any other VN I've played. And I'll just add a recommendation that, if you're an idiot like several-weeks-ago-me who hasn't played Steins;Gate yet, make the time for it as soon as you can.

I finished the last two endings with 20 minutes left in March (per my time zone): The phone response choice thing is still dumb, incidentally. Screw the butterfly effect. 10/10 - why play anything else?

I missed Kawasumi's post! Oddly specific, but I can't deny the effectiveness of this strategy. That song is amazing.

They seem to have accidentally featured Azuki in the video instead of Maple.

I feel suddenly compelled to play Noble☆Works, which has long languished in the infinite backlog, in glorious fullscreen on my 2560x1440 monitor. Thank you, @Fiddle-sama.

@hsmsful Don't underestimate the potentially life-changing impact of the smallest, briefest events. If you like her, talk to her - every moment can be the one that matters most, for both of you! Earlier today I was musing on how much of my current life has been directed by single, arbitrary, small-at-the-time decisions. Pretty much all of it, really. Most of them have been ill-informed, and some of them have even arguably been ill-advised, but I'm pretty happy right now, so it's all good.

I spent > an hour listening to all the stuff in this thread and responding (and actually even still I'm not quite done listening yet...). So, thanks, everybody! This is already a huge success as far as I'm concerned, but if anybody's got more, keep em coming! Nah, Huey Lewis is just good 80s music. Good retro 80s music is Chromeo: I do recall hearing something I liked from Rise Against before - probably in Rock Band? Let's see... yeah, I really liked "Give It All" in Rock Band 2. And I like this song, too - so, thanks, I'll pick up an album! Generally speaking, I do like some metal, though it's not my main thing - in terms of older stuff, I like Megadeth somewhat, but Metallica I'm not too fond of. More recently, I liked Avenged Sevenfold's City of Evil album, especially Sidewinder (dat acoustic solo): Random, but interesting. Their flavor of synthpop reminds me a lot of Leitbur, who seems to be on the road to legitimately making it as a band now, but who I only know of because of their contributions to the OCRemix FFVI album a few years ago (which I rather liked), which happened before they'd put out any kind of album: REM is one of my very favorites , so you just went up a notch in my personal Fuwanovel user rankings (no, they don't actually exist) for bringing them up right away . I love Document and Murmur, especially. Hard-Fi, I liked a lot; although the band sounds completely different, the singer's voice reminds me quite a bit of Bloc Party's (though it really might just be the accent...). Tried Blackmore Night and ... didn't like it. Will listen to the rest of your suggestions shortly. Picked one at random on youtube, since it seems the link you provided is blocked for the US because record companies suck. The one I picked was "The Girl In Byakkoya", which was weird, but interesting. I'm not sure yet if I like it or not - usually, for me, whatever the topic, the "not sure if want" reaction means that if I get used to it I'll like it a lot, so I'll keep listening. Unfortunately, it seems Ben Howard's voice isn't my favorite, but it turns out I love his songs and the way he sings, so I'll keep listening until I get to like the timbre as well. At any rate, he went straight to the top of my list of stuff to pick up. Thank you! Listened to "You". Sold. Pop-punk is 100% ok by me, generally speaking - I'm not ashamed to admit that I enjoy all four Fall Out Boy albums I've heard (and I didn't realize they had an album last year, or I would've picked that up too). I listened to "The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows" and it didn't really click, though, so I'll probably pass on this band for now, unless you have a song to point me at that might grab me more. Now that works for me. It turns out you like metal but don't realize that it's metal - @FruitsPunchSamurai can probably offer you some good pointers Actually, I hadn't heard them before, but Xandria's singer does have a crazy voice that I really like, so I'll give that some more time to see if I can get myself to enjoy the instrumentation more and enjoy it. Orchestra-backed metal usually sounds a little too cheesy for me, but hey, I actually like Northern Kings, so nothing is impossible.

Aside from the ones I've listed above, it's too annoying and long to list; if there were a VNDB for music I might fill it out, but it would take forever anyway...

I've not been listening to much new music for the last few years and wanted to start remedying that. I'm going back to work in a few weeks, which likely means lots of time with headphones on, and despite it being augmented with a lot of VN soundtracks lately, my music library is getting a bit stale. Sure, I could use one of those hip new services that all the kids are using for their music, but I'm old and weird, and I like buying and listening to whole albums by a single artist, so those often don't work so well for me. Plus it's more fun to have an excuse to chat about music with people than it is to experience music in a vacuum. In general, I can enjoy listening to pretty much anything with a good hook, so anything you think is good is welcome. But if you want to recommend something more specific, my preferences for recommendations tend towards: rock music from the last couple decades (let's say grunge era onwards; I like older stuff, but I mostly have a pretty good handle on it already) not too harsh a sound (e.g., although I do like Cage the Elephant, it's a bit rough around the edges for my usual taste; same with most punk music, though The Clash gets a pass) good, distinctive vocals, usually especially male vocals, and especially vocals with strong harmonies (I don't only listen to vocal music, but voices are pretty important to me: Fleet Foxes, Imogen Heap, Yuna, Iron and Wine; I like all of these artists because of the way they sing) not a necessity by any means, but I am partial prog rock (Minus the Bear: 10, good!) Random examples of more bands that I really like which are not mentioned above, and which may or may not fit in any of the above categories: Bon Iver, Belle and Sebastian, Guster, Idlewild, Sufjan Stevens, The Killers, Wilco Weeb stuff is fine (I've been known to listen to anisong and vocaloid as much as the next guy), but I'm really looking to get into more mainstream rock music at the moment, so I'd prefer that flavor of recommendation. Also, I promise if you offer me a recommendation, I'll listen to at least one whole song.

That's a really bizarre example, given that Clannad After Story directly discusses the fact that the main characters have sex in a rather prolonged and humorous dialog. Clannad After Story, actually, is a good example of somewhat effectively showing a progressing relationship without feeling any need to show a sex scene. Moreover, I imagine it depends on the situation. Do people actually talk directly about sex so much (outside of internet forums ) that you would really notice if it was just happening off the camera and not discussed during the story? I doubt I would notice at all, unless it's necessary to the plot. I find it hard to imagine it would be all that important in a story about trains. Clannad After Story only had to do it because the lead female character got pregnant and had a kid.

The Fruit of Grisaia common route, no question. I was laughing out loud constantly while reading it. I think it's because I really like the characters (including, perhaps especially, Yuuji), and the way they're played off each other for humor is brilliant.

So I've finished the first two seasons of DxD, and will probably get through the remaining one tomorrow. It's not really good, per se, but it is pretty fun. I wasn't sold on the story and setting until just about now - at the end of Season 1, I barely thought better of it than I did in my last post about it, even though the second arc was noticeably more interesting to me than the first. But then each arc in the second season was, again, a little better than the previous arc, and the end of season 2 really opened up a lot of potential character interactions and world-exploring options for future arcs, so now I'm actually interested to see where they go next. The harem side, which I thought would just be purely annoying, is actually a redeeming factor for the ecchi content, since it means it at least changes; otherwise it would be even more repetitive than it already is. The ecchi stuff... well, it is what it is. I'd be lying if I said I don't enjoy it every now and then, but it does get exasperating at times, especially when it's just retreading the same ground over and over. At any rate, Akeno is best girl, and is always interesting to watch, so all in all Season 2 worked out pretty well for me, even though

For those not getting or reading the updates, the reason for the delay is quite readily apparent. You can put that "the translation has been done for months" gun down, now, because it's pretty clear from past updates that the work for Steam integration was the last thing they were working on, and it's probably what took more time than they projected, leading to the delay. Regista probably significantly underestimated the amount of time needed for the various aspects of their Steam integration dev and testing, since they haven't done it before - this is an extremely common occurrence in any flavor of software engineering. I do find it annoying that Sekai Project stated a March release and then didn't communicate a delay until the end of the month - maximum transparency in communication and somewhat-cushioned estimates are the best way to avoid getting into trouble with delays. Generally, people don't actually mind these kinds of small delays very much, as long as you give advance warning of the delay, can clearly explain why the project was delayed, and can give a confident projection for when it can be expected. I actually don't even mind the "lots of things happened" kind of explanation, since I can read between the lines of the other updates, but they should work on improving the other two aspects (because delays will continue to happen; that's just how software is). Also, from the sounds of the Kickstarter update email, Regista went kind of dark on them for the last few weeks, but I think that's an unfair dodge on their part - I still hold SP responsible for not communicating better. As the publisher, they're responsible for polling status from Regista, minding the release timeline, and keeping people updated, and I do think they dropped the ball. But that said, it's far from a big deal, and like others have pointed out, they're still doing a vastly better job than a particular competitor of theirs (though, honestly, JAST USA is more of a joke than a competitor, at this point).

Good news: I have weathered the storm by going down to the lobby and reading, for the brief time where it was really loud in my apartment. Incidentally, Umberto Eco's essays on translation are well worth reading.

They're testing the fire alarms in my apartment today. There are two problems with this: I will be constantly hearing fire alarm sounds all day. I will have to get out of my apartment for a while during the test, but I don't know exactly when, and I already got outside earlier today anyway. Once is more or less my limit. I really wanted to finish Steins;Gate today

Team Down's enemy is clearly the RNG.

I finished my first playthrough I'm skipping through with a guide now to get the remaining two endings. Once I properly finish it, Steins;Gate is going to be my second 10 on VNDB (right next to Little Busters! #dealwithit).

Welcome! *checks VNDB* Gahkthun... 4... dropped... I don't think we can be friends. Nah, it's cool, you'll fit right in here; we have lots of Princess Evangile fans. If you're ever looking for a recommendation, drop by the Recommendations forum (and I will definitely not respond, since apparently that would end poorly for both of us).

Whenever anything that I want has a pay what you want model, I pay for it. Usually I try to find a comparable good and pay the cost of that - e.g., I think I paid $10 when I bought Radiohead's "In Rainbows" way back when, since that's around what CDs cost then. But I'm pretty weird in terms of spending habits in this particular market...

I'm amused to see Komari Kamikita's Spiral of Happiness described near the end of the article. I always thought there was something to that theory. Anyway, I have two anime meeting this criterion, which both impacted me the same way: Clannad After Story Usagi Drop Both made me feel that the experience of raising a child is something I intensely look forward to, and want to do a good job at. And while there's no risk of me having a child in the immediate future, I'll be an uncle in just a few months, and I'm very excited about that, at least.

It only goes up from there. Enjoy the ride