Fred the Barber

eden* wasn't an eroge to begin wtih, and doesn't sexualize Sion at all, IMO, unless you go to MangaGamer to get the edition with a small amount (I think? I don't have it, just read descriptions) of extra ero content tacked on. I seriously doubt anybody playing the Steam version of the game, without any further context, would view it in any kind of compromising light. It's a pretty far cry from Maitetsu, which from what I'm hearing seems to have a very strong emphasis on the ero content.

I'm pretty embarrassed about singing in public, but I do really enjoy it. Singing was always my favorite part of playing Rock Band, and I would do it quite happily even when playing it with a decent-sized party crowd. I was terrible at singing on-key when I first started, but I trained myself up pretty well with that game. I now sing frequently to myself at home, whenever I get songs with vocals stuck in my head.

@arms98: I've actually had a similar problem recently while playing Steins;Gate, and tracked it down to an issue with the mouse scroll wheel. When this happens to you, either try fussing with the scroll wheel a lot (scrolling in the opposite direction of the direction the cursor is moving, specifically, seems to get it back to "neutral"), or maybe just disconnect/reconnect your mouse if it helps.

So I watched... six episodes, I think, of DxD? The first arc, basically. It's... kind of not good, at least not unless you watch it the way ittaku suggested. I will keep watching anyway, up through to the end, so hopefully it gets better (shows often do, so I'm not doubting you guys just yet). At any rate, I'm not good at switching off my brain entirely - if I'm getting neither intellectual nor emotional stimulation, it doesn't do much for me (and if I'm being honest with myself, the second one is a much bigger deal than the first one). So far, neither of those is happening.

Well-said! Edit because I made more progress and wanted to comment on it, but didn't want to double-post: So, I started up chapter 8, which is going fine, but I have to comment on the events right at the beginning of chapter 8: Anyway, I don't consider this a spoiler, just good advice: when the chance arises, go down the side route before moving on to the main chapter.

I wonder if I'm the only person here who has eaten ramen from legit ramen restaurants, but never eaten instant ramen. At any rate, at least the real stuff is good. The salty-noodles-in-a-cup stuff probably tastes good too

I surrender.

Finally found a good chunk of time and got through the side-route at the end of Chapter 7. Next, on to Chapter 8!

Guys, if you don't stop talking about DxD soon, I'm going to end up watching it, and I'll only regret it afterwards. Especially when I keep watching all the subsequent seasons. I have so much legit anime to watch. I haven't even seen Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso yet, as I was forcibly reminded yesterday when I was magnetically pulled to a Blu-ray copy of it on the show floor at SakuraCon and my wallet teleported into my hands. So now that's on the shelf waiting for me, next to F/SN UBW, Attack on Titan, Silver Spoon, and a dozen other highly-regarded shows. And yet here I am right on the cusp of watching an oppai harem instead.

Oooh, I like this one, Kaguya! Red hair, check. Winking, check. Sultry grin, check. Weird checklist, check. 9/10

On the "where did they go" topic, I noticed Cerulean dropped off the map recently. Still logging in, apparently, but not posting?

I'm surprised nobody commented on this... I gave it a like already, but I just have to add: this is astonishingly good.

Ahh, I think you have the wrong idea somewhat. I don't have a visual ready to hand, but the gesture you see in anime and VNs is more prolonged than the second one, and more of a gentle rubbing than a patting gesture. In the US, there's an affectionate gesture towards kids called ruffling their hair - it seems to be not quite the same as that (again, a little gentler), but much closer to that than to the second image you posted there.

Amusingly, and I swear I'm not making this up, the protag has past train-associated trauma. Overcoming that is part of the story.

This is kind of by the wayside, but I am completely serious here: having your head rubbed by someone towards whom you feel affection feels great. The anime/VN hype for that particular display of affection is real.

Actually, you're missing the point - you've proposed a rule of thumb, but everywhere I look, I see more examples that go against your rule than I see examples that support it. If your rule holds, it should be pretty easy for you to pluck out many more examples than I have provided counterexamples, in a given random sample. I've tried two random samples (VNs I happen to have played, and anime starting with the letter A), and everywhere I look, things come up against your proposed rule - the ball's in your court if you want to keep arguing for your claim.

Really? Kurisu blushes like a sunset every time Okabe is sincere with her. She's just a classic tsundere. I can see where you're coming from, but at least for me, I don't think of it as abusive. There's a mismatch in their power in the relationship. But that is not uncommon; relationships aren't always between equals (compare, for instance, your relationship with your boss, or your teacher, or when younger your parents). I think Okabe thinks of himself as a teacher for Luka; he's hard on him because he cares about Luka getting mentally stronger. I don't think the relationship hurts or demeans either of them.

Welcome back, Shiko - you've been missed, even if your horrible sig hasn't been.

I'll agree with you on that last line, definitely; I'd probably play the 18+ release of Leyline rather than a censored release. Uncut Maitetsu is almost certainly out of my league, though.

On a tip from a SakuraCon panel yesterday, I picked up Oshiete Galko-chan. It's different, funny, and short.

Let us know how the H content is

I've played it once, with my friend, at PAX. We're really bad at communicating with each other though. I kept talking, and nonetheless we exploded. B+, not as advertised.

Sure. Let's look at the "A"s. I've heard of AoKana and Air, and by most accounts, both have quite good anime adaptations. The rest I haven't heard of, so I don't know if the VN, the anime, or both are crap. To be clear, citing the full list isn't evidence for you - you specifically need to show examples of good VNs with bad anime. That list is going to include a ton of bad VNs with bad anime adaptations, which don't prove your point at all. The mental list I went through was VNs I've played with anime adaptations. There are definitely bad ones - Majikoi and Grisaia pop into my mind immediately. Ok, that's two. That's a much shorter list than my list of good VNs with good anime adaptations.

Ok, I'm back in the land of the living after a very late night. So a few comments: Seriously, there were a lot of people chuckling at me about the Maitetsu question. I saw the lolis and kind of knew what I was signing up for, but I wasn't quite aware of the extent of the H content and quite how young the characters looked. Anyway, I actually just tweeted at dovac about that question and got an interesting response: "We had internal discussions about this, but just can't talk about it at this time." This is very much in line with how I interpret their response last night: it wasn't a denial, or even a hinted denial, of any kind of 18+ release. It was an extremely neutral question dodge. I really don't know what to expect - if it were already decided to be something as simple as "there will be no H content", I don't think they would be responding the way they are. My guess is that it's still an in-progress discussion, both with the developer and internally, trying to figure out what kind of balance they should tread to maintain their reputation with all camps and to make the release have the maximum positive impact. None of us is in a position to predict the future here - let's wait and see what happens. Regardless, I actually don't care - I almost certainly will play Maitetsu, because the idea is cute, the art looks freaking gorgeous, and I have no problem with the occasional moege (I seriously love IMHHW, censorship, bad translation, and all). And when I do play Maitetsu, you can bet I'm going to play that censored Steam release. I don't know why people are talking about Kickstarters WRT the SP announcements. They said absolutely nothing about it at SakuraCon, and I don't think they said anything about Kickstarter at Anime Boston either. Each time they announce something is going through Kickstarter, it's been announced as having a Kickstarter from the beginning, right? I think there's clearly not going to be one for any of this stuff. Will SP get a little less incomprehensible hate about Kickstarter after this? Probably not. I am pretty hyped about Ley Line. It's good to see SP had another solid announcement up their sleeve for Boston and didn't dump everything at SakuraCon. I'm actually really happy about the recent pattern of fan translation projects turning into officially-licensed releases. Fan translators deserve compensation for their work, and as a significant and growing group of fans, we deserve to be taken seriously by the original developers and publishers. This new trend, and the very clear rapid growth of the US VN-reading market over the last couple years, are very positive signs. MangaGamer, I am disappoint. But you're releasing Tokyo Babel in the next week, so you know what, actually we're totally square. I have a fair bit of faith in their recent product decisions, so I'm sure they'll come back swinging next time.

It went really well! I was going to post last night, but, well... Anyway, I was up so late that despite not getting anywhere near enough sleep, I just now got settled in front of a computer again briefly (before, of course, heading back to the con shortly). My biggest fear was that nobody would show up, but the opposite happened: the crowd was so big that people had to be turned away at the door! So that's a little sad, but on the other hand, I had a big, interested group of people. Also, apparently they had a projector malfunction in that room and no replacement, so my slides were up on a depressingly tiny 32" TV screen. Thankfully the room wasn't that big, so people were able to read the large text of my slides (which I'm quite certain of because the whole room was laughing at both the second Steam slide and the Steins;Gate slide well before I said anything). But I think the game screenshots were probably illegible, so things like my Grisaia Somalia reference and my closing joke didn't play as well as they should have. The presentation itself went off really well - by my own lights, I did better on each topic than I did in any of my rehearsals. I must've talked at light speed, though, since I was apparently done in ~30 minutes... but whatever, people didn't seem to mind. I did the eye contact thing; it clearly worked. The Q&A section went for about 10 minutes, and revealed a pretty diverse crowd: I had a passionate otome fan who had played pretty much everything she could get her hands on and was looking for new stuff. She was mostly interested in the importing + fan TL side of things, and we had a little chat after the panel was over. I mentioned that I'd been planning to pick up Hakuoki soon, and her eyes lit up. I had another female who had a friend that was trying to get her into VNs, but only knew about JList, and she was loth to spend $80 and wait a month to play something. So, she was very happy to hear about all the more affordable options I'd laid out. I had a /r/visualnovels redditor who helped me out with a couple additional pointers about the reddit VN community, and who grilled me about my basis for believing the Grisaia translation to be better-written than the original Japanese (my answer: I can understand a lot of the original dialog, and it's clearly not as colorful as koestl's translation) I had the three people who, for the last few years, had been hosting a kind of "what are visual novels" panel at SakuraCon. I actually ran into them early at the Sekai Project line and asked why they weren't running the panel this year, and the main guy said "I forgot about the deadline. But it looks like somebody else is doing a panel, so I guess it worked out ok". That of course elicited a chuckle and a "That's me". They were quite helpful, especially in fielding some audience questions - clearly a lot more experienced than I am. I was chatting briefly before the panel with the SakuraCon volunteer who was running ops for my panel; when I mentioned I was running the only visual novel fan panel at SakuraCon, it turned out that he had no idea visual novels existed, and assumed that I was using some weird name for graphic novels. He got into it enough that he asked a question during the Q&A session too All told, the room was at capacity with 25 attendees. I had two people leave near the end (maybe they had somewhere to be at 11; still hurts a bit), but the rest of the crowd seemed really into it, sticking around all the way through the end of the Q&A, and I got a couple big rounds of applause. I walked out in company with the friend I'd brought along (who had never played more than a little bit of F/SN before deciding it wasn't for him, but who I apparently completely sold on picking up Grisaia; I really thought Comyu would be more his speed since he loves mecha...), as well as the past-year panelists and a few other random people, all of whom were chatting about ancient VN lore I knew nothing about. It was a great vibe, and I'm really happy that, even if those people didn't get anything from my presentation directly, I provided a venue for them to meet up and chat. So, yeah, it was an absolute blast, and I definitely achieved my goal of bringing knowledge to a few more people and helping the community grow a little bit.