Fred the Barber

I'm trying to set the hooks for various flagship VNs with existing English translations in as few words as possible. I'm not looking for a summary, nor even themes. Rather, I'm looking for the hook: whatever sells the VN as appealing; the word or words you would always utter when explaining what a VN is about. The briefer you can say it, the better. The acceptable maximum is six words. Here's a few examples of my own (maybe more will come tomorrow; this isn't actually that easy, in general): Comyu: absurdism and giant robots Little Busters: friendship Clannad: family The rules are simple: the VN whose hook is described should be good (otherwise, why bother?) the hook must be at most six words So write one and post it. Six words is a hard limit, because constraints encourage greater creativity. I'm mostly interested in VNs with an English translation, but if you've got something to share, go for it.

6/10 - the face is kind of small, and the expression seems rather jaded.

Tell us, Hououin, what exactly that gained you?

Sorry, Eclipsed, but since you only exist on the internet, you're a 2D person.

Pretty much. First half of season 1 of SAO is one of my favorites, for pretty much exactly the reasons you listed: Asuna, great episodic characters, a feeling of real progression (especially romantically), and a feeling that everything matters. That said, if you can bring yourself to do it, seriously, stop watching after the Aincrad arc ends. I'm sure you'll never thank me for it, but on the other hand if you do keep watching, I can pretty much guarantee that one day you'll come back and say you should have listened to me. It basically ruins everything that was great about SAO previously... but it's insidious, so you might not notice at first.

Confession: I had to do that last night, with a large group of basically strangers. My closest acquaintances were: one person who was a friend in high school who I've seen once since; one person I was kind of friends with in middle school and have seen once since; and one passing acquaintance from high school. Now, keep in mind I've been out of high school for well over a decade, so I have almost no connection to even those people. Also, literally all of them are seemingly either married or engaged, and I'm decidedly not, which always helps To my surprise, after the initial shock period I had a fantastic time, and got along especially well with that passing acquaintance from high school. It was a positive enough connection that I'd go so far as to say I met new friends! Got even more socializing to do today, with some good friends I see all the time, and one older set of friends I haven't seen in a long time. I'm looking forward to both of those as well! Turns out real life is often a lot more fun than 2D life. Who'd have thought.

This is very true. I actually restarted my first game after 10 turns because I finally read about and understood libido - I easily beat the game in 46 turns that first time through. Second time through I was annoyed by lack of NG+ at first, but then I found I was again much better at the mechanics, and now I'm in a position to beat it in about 35 turns. Next game should be a little bit easier still simply because of the route I'm taking (Subaru true love) - correctly skilling out Narika to be a castle runner will take no effort since her starting SP is so high. The second game I was doing Narika's true love route, so I made Haruka my castle runner, which is a pain since she has such low starting SP. Incidentally, Narika is a beast in general. High starting SP and Reflex are a pretty sweet combo, and you can quickly turn her deficits (low starting attack and barrier - defense is for pansies anyway) into positives with the right training (the +lotsOfAttack skill and +statsForTraining skill). Haruka took a lot longer to make strong, mostly because of the initial low SP - it's generally just not that easy to increase max SP at the rate I want to, especially early in the game. It looks like I won't even be getting the third skill for Haruka on either this playthrough or the next.

Obscurity is clearly IPB's primary feature - somehow I'm not surprised it doesn't want you to be able to monitor it.

Very nice! Makes me want to try my hand at modding. One thing I've been itching to look at is seeing whether you can replace a character's dialog. If I could go do that, given that I did name my character Ness and his farm Onett Farm, maybe I could replace Shane's sprite, portrait, and dialog, and turn him into a Happy Happy Cultist. Naturally, I'd also have to go into his likes/dislikes preferences and adjust them so he only likes blue things.

So, here's exactly what I did when I installed it: 1) Both installer.zip and data.bin went to my "downloads" folder by default 2) Explicitly extracted the .zip file to a new folder (right-click, extract, or something along those lines) 3) Moved the .bin file to the resulting folder with the unzipped installer 4) Ran the installer. I can't tell from your screenshot if the .bin and the installer are sitting in the same folder, or if you're trying to run the installer by just double-clicking the zip file and then double-clicking the installer, i.e. without explicitly extracting the zip file. If it's the latter, I wouldn't be surprised when it doesn't work, but if it's the former, it worked for me so I don't know what else to say...

9/10: I'm a sucker for grayscale art + colored eyes, and it goes well with the intense expression

True, for about 8 years now. It felt really weird at first; your scalp is really sensitive when it's suddenly exposed to the elements. Getting rained on still makes me twitch a little. Next person hasn't replaced the batteries in anything they own for over a year.

Soul Eater. It's mostly a typical shounen battle show, but it's a pretty good one... right up until the last episode, when, with all the pieces properly in place, instead of going for the obvious and satisfying resolution, it used a sequence of Mass Effect 3-level asspulls.

I was kind of thinking the same thing... Next time I'm definitely going after the happy-go-lucky borderline-alcoholic vegetarian, which is much more my type in real life anyway.

Oh man, that's brilliant. I might even try that one out. Though sadly I still haven't bought a horse, despite now having mountains of cash on hand - I was actually going to buy the stable last time I played, but it turns out I'm short of iron bars . Well, maybe next time I play I'll go grind out the requisite ore. Just a brief status summary: - I'm now halfway through summer in the second year, married to Abigail, with a kid on the way. Marriage is clearly supposed to be a perk, but literally the most Abigail ever does for me is either hand me a piece of bread, or to fill my cat's water bowl. She waters crops, but all my crops are on sprinklers. She feeds animals, but my barn and coop are fully upgraded so they're on an autofeeder. It makes me a little sad every time she tells me about how she was helpful. - I'll be able to finish the last community center bundle on the 3rd of fall - I screwed up my apple tree on my first year through (by hoeing the tiles around it to keep it clear... ugh), so despite my planting it in early summer, it didn't grow up until early winter. At any rate, once I have them apples, I'll go hand them in and find out what happens when you finish revitalizing the whole community center. - You can actually tell by looking at my farm that it was kind of planned out, which is a huge improvement over every past season - the whole thing is on sprinklers, of course (mostly still the medium tier). I'm still only using about 1/3 of the land - there's just no motivation for me to use the rest, especially since money is no object for me at the moment. The rest of the farm all just grows grass. I suppose I could put another barn over there or something to consume more grass, but it really annoys me to have to spend time maintaining animals every day, so I've actually sold off most of the ones I had. - I have about 14 of kegs constantly in use - selling starfruit wine is still ludicrously profitable. - Just pulled in my first legendary fish, from the ocean. I'll probably go for the one in the sewer next time I play. - Still only level 8 fishing, level 9 mining, and level 9 combat. Foraging and farming are both level 10. - Iridium is still a pain in the ass.

So first of all, I don't agree about your redefinition of rape. Legally speaking, the definitions vary state to state in the US, but across the board, use of force and lack of consent imply rape. So, legally speaking, the distinction you're drawing is wrong. If you want to talk about some definition of rape outside of the legal term, that's fine I guess, but if you want to apply the nuances of your definition in real life, then Down's "try to not get yourself arrested, dude" is a pretty well-earned warning. Now, even setting that aside, your claim here is a blatant misstatement - the scene in question is not just "sex without explicitly given consent", it's sex with consent explicitly forbidden (if I recall correctly, both before the act in past scenes, and certainly during the act). - she actually repeatedly said "no". Whether that slightly stronger condition meets your already-redefined term of rape is, I guess, up to you.

8/10 post. It's a valid issue, but a really melodramatic way of stating it. But it gets another +0.477 for a good custom emoticon, and +0.256 because Dice is an all-around good guy, so 8.733 overall. Now, so that this isn't a total shitpost... Normally I'm reading one VN at a time, but I've somehow found myself embroiled in both Steins;Gate and Grisaia no Kajitsu at the same time. And I also keep sinking lots of time into Beat Blades Haruka, because it's such a different experience - for me it's like playing a more traditional video game rather than reading a VN. Bizarrely, this has been the trigger for me to finally learn time budgeting, which is something I've always been horrible at - so S;G gets 1-2 hours a day, GnK gets 1-2 hours a day, Stardew Valley gets 1-2 hours a day, and BBH gets the remainder of my gaming time. Incidentally, that's a lot of hours total, so it's a good thing I'm on vacation for a while longer, or I'd be having to make up some even more complicated system for juggling all of these, like alternating days. I've hardly spent any time with Steins;Gate yet, so it's at the bottom of the pile, but it's climbing rapidly. I watched the anime (which was awesome), so I know a lot of what to expect (which is unfortunate), but the experience of playing the game feels quite a bit different (which is good!). Still deciding how I feel about the game art, especially - it looks quite different from what I'm used to. I love the coloring, but I'm not crazy about the way characters are shaped. Music is excellent - I don't recall hearing much of what I've heard so far in the Steins;Gate anime, but maybe it just wasn't very prominent (unlike, say, typical adaptations of Key works which feature the game OST pretty prominently). Grisaia no Kajitsu, where I'm still in the common route, remains top dog in terms of appreciation, but because the content is so episodic I don't feel that strong a pull to read it. Whenever I do sit down with it, I laugh out loud every few minutes, though; the comedy is pure gold. Makina is easily my favorite character, though all of the rest have their moments too. Beat Blades Haruka is the lowest of the three in terms of appreciation, but the gameplay element makes me constantly reflect on what I should be doing next. Since it's always on my mind that way, it's the one I usually feel like playing; if I weren't consciously balancing between these things, I'd probably just be playing BBH all the time. Because of that "one more turn" phenomenon, it's also got the strongest pull for me to keep playing once I've sat down with it - my sessions with BBH are usually turning out to be around 3 hours long.

Today I picked up Amagi Brilliant Park to watch while cooking. Dinner was simple so I only got in one episode, but that first episode was pretty damn strong. I'm looking forward to more of the show.

I feel that one. A confession of my own in the same vein: I was a narcissistic shit in middle school who knocked everybody else to make myself feel better. An adult (a teacher at school, I think it was) told me as much, though not in those words, and explained that it was hurting the feelings of... well... most of the people around me. Thank God for that. Having to live with and reflect on past massive character flaws like that is painful as hell, but is probably what makes me (hopefully) a better human being today.

I picked this up mostly because @KosakiFag is such a big Alicesoft fan that I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about. One thing that tipped me over the edge for this release was the ability to skip all the rape scenes - which probably sounds like anathema to most of the people in this thread, but deal with it; I'm a wimp that way. Anyway, about the game. H-scenes are fine and all, but I'd probably pick up a more straightforward nukige if that's all I was looking for. Nonetheless, I find myself playing the game for pretty long stretches (actually longer than I would a more typical VN), and the reason is of course the gameplay elements. I find I really enjoy these simple optimization problems, and I especially appreciate that the dice are fixed. I have no desire to reload over and over again to get a better dice roll, but I will happily reload once to make a better decision on what to do with the dice/points/etc. I have. The mechanics are a little under-explained, but the only ones I didn't get yet were Libido and Brutality. Re-reading arunaru's post on the MG staff blog explained Libido quite clearly, so now I regret not pursuing raising that up higher, sooner . And I'm planning to leave Brutality at 0, so that's fine too. I'm only on day 10 or so at this point, but it's quite a lot of fun. I'm about to attempt the first castle raid and am curious to see what that's like.

My allegation (unless you were also accused by some other barber, I suppose) was purely in jest, of course . I was actually surprised to see how many VNs there were involving time! At any rate, I'm looking forward to it. I'll try to get started today and put in an hour or two per day, and definitely won't be using a guide for as long as possible.

Well, the interviewing chapter of my life is coming to a close. Today I heard back from the fourth and final company with which I interviewed: another "no thanks", leaving me with two offers. It's weird. The two that gave me offers were certainly the two I was most interested in, so I should be fine with it (and I mostly am), but it's still pretty crushing to hear that somebody doesn't want me. So, at this point it's just a matter of making a final decision and hammering out details like start date (which won't be until April). Also, in case you missed the other threads where I mentioned this and somehow care: I'll be presenting a panel "Getting Started With Visual Novels" at SakuraCon in a couple of weeks. If you're in the area and want to support and/or harass me in person, please come by!

Take care of yourself, and good luck, LinovaA!

Most people don't like Benio's route, and most people cite the ideals clash as the reason (well, that and the finale). So, don't worry - the game still gets good reviews from tons of people who feel the same way. Of course, I happen to not be one of them. Benio is love.

I've said this elsewhere, but cons are a pretty amazing experience, especially for a hobby like this one. I have approximately two real-life friends who I can talk to about otaku stuff, neither of whom I see often; the friends I see often will at least kind of smile and nod if I put a lot of effort into putting stuff into context and making it relatable, but it's usually just too much effort. So the internet is my main outlet for talking about otaku hobbies. Going to a convention flips that on its head - it's a huge rush every time you realize that literally every single person around you is excited about anime and is there because they want to talk about it. It's a tremendously positive vibe; you should totally do it! And wherever you are, there's probably a convention fairly close to you. Sakuracon just happens to be in my backyard, so I've been attending for the last few years since I got into this stuff. Since last year I've even been considering finding another one later in the convention season to fly to, just to get that feeling more often.