Fred the Barber

Rewrite is top-tier stuff, and easily one of my favorite Visual Novels. In addition to what Shiko said (all of it accurate), I'll add that the music is also excellent.

Let's not go any further on this tangent... Funya, thanks again for the good suggestion. If there's any more useful suggestions or critique out there, don't hesitate to throw it my way. I've still got a week or so before the submission deadline.

Thanks, this is a good suggestion - I'll probably do a short infodump at the beginning, both on that exact topic and also briefly about broad genres, to give people some basic guidance about what they should look for given their existing otaku interests, before launching into the specifics on resources. Sorry, firecat, but it seems like you're not the target audience I'm trying to address, nor are you really understanding what I'm trying to accomplish for that audience... For some context, in case you're trying to be helpful: I attended a fan-run VN-related panel at Sakura-Con last year, and also chatted a fair bit with some of the attendees about their VN experiences. While there was a small group of hardcore fans present, and while all of that group certainly knew far more than I did about VNs, most of the people even at that VN panel were pretty unaware of the broader context. Most of them had played Katawa Shoujo, and many of them had played If My Heart Had Wings with the H-scene restoration patch (I strongly suspect this is popular with that group because of a unique combination of Steam availability and direct link from the Steam comments to the H-scene restoration patch), and... that was it. That was the whole of the VN world, as far as they knew. You probably don't get how literally I mean this; as an illustration, these people had actually never heard of Fate/Stay Night, which I was talking about quite a bit since I was in the middle of playing it at the time. That panel last year, while intending to educate people about VNs, didn't cover anything practical - it was about why VNs are interesting, what kinds of VNs there are, and so on. It was very much along the lines of what you're suggesting, I think. While some amount of that context and the subsequent discussion is certainly useful, and I certainly enjoyed parts of it myself, many of those people I met had a much more fundamental problem which isn't going to be solved by any amount of that material. No matter how pumped up you got those people to play a VN, they'd likely arrive in front of their computer and say "Well, now what." It's easy to say they should just figure it out (after all, we all did), but the truth is it's pretty hard to for non-Japanese-speaking VN fans to find most of the material out there, especially the fan-translated material. Building up your mental library of resources, understanding how each of them works, and so on takes quite a lot of time, and isn't really presented anywhere (that I've seen) in a coherent fashion. The lack of clear and simple practical advice means that many people who could end up being part of this community instead are left out, to everyone's detriment. This community could be much bigger, but it remains pretty isolated, and I think that's largely just because everybody here has kind of found what they need, or at least knows where to ask. So... yeah. That's what I want to help fix, in my small way

Only ketchup please. Mayo and mustard = Bleh. In all seriousness, try mustard again in a few years. I hated the stuff when I was young, and probably never ate it at all from the time I was 10 until I was maybe 25. Then I tried it again and thought, "This stuff is great!" Your food preferences can change a lot over the years. I know this but I'm very picky when it comes to food, and I don't like tasting new things, it usually ends with me being partially disgusted. You do know that I go searching through this thread's logs for this exact quote every time you ask that right? You do know that that's why I do it, right?

I'd probably change the vote to "Nii-san" if it were available. I like a little bit of affectation in my moe, but it's easy to go overboard...

Only ketchup please. Mayo and mustard = Bleh. In all seriousness, try mustard again in a few years. I hated the stuff when I was young, and probably never ate it at all from the time I was 10 until I was maybe 25. Then I tried it again and thought, "This stuff is great!" Your food preferences can change a lot over the years. But why male models?

Not a single "-san" option? Anyway, onii-chan wins for the moment, because I just wrapped up Mei's route in Clannad yesterday.

I've pretty much convinced myself that I want to submit a panel proposal to Sakura-Con 2016. Below is a copy-paste of the text I've put together for the submission. I'm looking for ideas and feedback from you fine folks. It says so below, but keep in mind while reading that if you're here on Fuwanovel, you're probably not the target audience for the proposed panel; I'm aiming to help out less-experienced people who are interested in VNs but don't know where to start (think: everybody you know who read Katawa Shoujo, enjoyed it, and then never played another VN because they didn't know it was a thing). Ideas for further content are especially welcome, and I'll also welcome any critiques on wording, etc., Title: Getting Started With Visual Novels Description for the con booklet: From newer series like Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Bladeworks to older series like Clannad and Steins;Gate, many well-loved anime are adaptations of Visual Novels. But many of the best Visual Novels have no such adaptation, but are available in English translation. If you want to see what you've been missing, or want to understand more about Visual Novels and the experience of reading them in the West, come learn: - where to find news about recent and upcoming English-language Visual Novel releases - where to buy officially-licensed English translations - how to import visual novels from Japan and apply fan translations - where to find communities for discussing Visual Novels and seeking personal recommendations - how to find Visual Novels you might like Detailed description of the format: The goal of the panel is to provide novice and intermediate VN readers with resources to get them bootstrapped reading new material which is relevant to their interests. The target audience is especially people who are interested in VNs, and who maybe have some VN experience (say, people who have only read Katawa Shoujo), but who aren't aware of the huge corpus of VNs available in English. I'll be telling the audience about companies like JAST, MangaGamer, and SekaiProject; communities like FuwaNovel and /r/VisualNovels; tools like VNDB and (the new) VNTLS; and international shipping services like Mandarake and Tenso. I'll provide relevant examples of high-profile VNs available through each, and talk briefly about the relative merits of each. I expect this to take about half an hour to forty minutes, and then will use the remaining time for open discussion of Visual Novels.

In that case, if you're finding it easy, either I'm misremembering (it's been a while) or I just didn't have a good party make-up for it. And I definitely don't remember any kind of 19-floor dungeon...

That part hits the feels pretty hard. Fight on, Funya. The game starts to get a little bit harder in that dungeon, IIRC - I believe that's when I upgraded to a Trumpeter, which I think I stuck with for the rest of the game, and started really abusing the insta-kill skills.

This is not exactly promising... Given the feedback here, I'm torn on picking up Noble Works. On the one hand, it's a good sign that Suzu is saying positive things and seems to be enjoying it. On the other hand, Austin Darts is comparing it unfavorably with Princess Evangile, which I thought was frankly a second-rate VN. At this rate, Noble Works is going in the moege queue behind 1) KoiChoco and 2) HoshiMemo, which likely means effectively "not getting played", unless I find myself with a whole lot of free time all of a sudden.

That's me, most days, when I take the time to reflect.

I've still only seen Season 1 of Working!, but it remains the #1 comedy I've ever seen. I keep putting off watching Season 2 so I have something to look forward to. I'm glad to hear it stays true to form to the end!

Zeno, the key to being good at anything, including cooking, is practice and repetition, and thinking about what went wrong. I find I can consistently do a good job with any given dish only after I thoroughly screw it up at least once. I'm a good baker, at this point, and quite passable at cooking in general. Assuming the recipe you have is good, if you make it a couple more times, you'll have it down. If the recipe you're following is bad, well, obviously no amount of repetition is going to help with that...

Confession: I occasionally get the urge to write lyrics for a parody song named "Bishies Ain't Shit".

This particular concern is actually dealt with within the game, and I think they did an even better job of addressing it in the anime adaptation of Persona 4. Unfortunately, the anime adaptation kinda sucks in all other regards (I remember particularly being bummed about the completely insufficient amount of Sayoko, aka Best Girl Without A Persona), so I can't recommend it.

I know this isn't what you asked for, but given that piracy is high discouraged here, here's what you get for the Comyu question. You can buy the Comyu soundtrack from CDJapan: http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/KIZC-4001

If My Heart Had Wings has a horribly butchered translation. I did not apply the patch to add back H-scenes. Despite both of those, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I highly recommend it. Moreover, (I swear I am seriously not trolling but simply stating my belief here) I honestly suspect it's a better game without the H content. Yes, it's censored. Yes, I care on principal, but in practice, for one specific game, I'll set aside my principals to play it; and I bet it's better this way, despite what happened to poor Ageha's route... As Tyrael pointed out, Fault: Milestone One is well spoken-of, affordable, and not censored/altered in any way. Though I haven't gotten around to playing it myself, so I can't speak for it myself... Sorry to hear you didn't like World End Economica... I'm actually a big fan of that series. For what it's worth, I find the characters much more compelling in Episode 2 vs. Episode 1, though the plot resolution in Episode 2 is much less satisfying vs. Episode 1 (I need Episode 3)

I haven't played a VN in at least a week, maybe two, even though I've had plenty of time. Makes me guilty. This weekend, I will change that - I'm going to power through as much Clannad as I can manage to try to get back on track. I feel like if I can finish off the rest and reach Nagisa's storyline, I'll be able to see it through, but I'm so far still stuck finishing endless other storylines that I feel less invested in just to make sure I can eventually get the true ending... Too many other fun things waiting - I'm reevaluating KoiChoco, which I had previously planned to do next, since I was hoping for it to be a quick fun break, but it's apparently rather long according to VNDB. It's time to go do my Christmas shopping for myself, regardless, to pick up a couple more VNs to add to my backlog. Gahkthun is definitely getting imported this time around, and it might end up being the next thing I play after Clannad, given Decay's simple and to-the-point recommendation; it's probably also time I finally picked up a copy of Ever17.

I'm late to the party because family, but Merry Non-Denominational Holiday Greetings, Fuwans. I hope it was a good day spent with family for you, just like it was for me. Confession: I was listening to the Key Classic arranged album on the way back, and resolved to rewatch the Kanon 2006 anime again, as well as to get back to it and actually finish reading the Clannad VN, because of these two:

Correct. Burst is the starting point, and is on 3DS, only downloadable. From what I've read, the director thinks the 3DS games are the "main series" games, so maybe you don't need to do Shinovi Versus next and could theoretically skip on to the next 3DS game if you really wanted to... but I just bought Shinovi Vs. and will play that next, because, why not.

I finished the Hanzo storyline of Senran Kagura Burst, and after fussing around doing completionist things for a while (at some point I will complete all the stages in Frantic mode... but not right now), I started the Hebijo storyline. After playing one Senran Kagura game all the way through, I have a lot more respect for this series than I used to, for two reasons: 1) the gameplay is far more fun than I expected, and 2) the approach to the ecchi content is so ludicrously thorough and unapologetic. To put it another way, the game is completely uncompromising. It's not just a fun game with a smattering of fanservice. No, that wouldn't be enough. It's crucial to this one crazy person's ecchi artistic vision that there also be frequent yuri, destructible clothes, short skirts and high winds, beach episodes, changing rooms, only massive knockers (except on poor self-conscious Mirai...), a hyperactive physics engine where the aforementioned knockers are concerned, frequent open discussion of said knockers, and on and on. It's a good game, and it's a freaking festival of ecchi. Japan, you're weird, but I love you for it. Also, I need to trademark "Short Skirts and High Winds" for... something. Maybe a band name.

Same here, no matter what I do I can only type "tiag from verela" or some other hopeless rendition, it's just too hard to type the actual thing since the pronunciation goes everywhere We should probably bribe an admin to forcibly change his name to Big T or something equally humiliating, for the greater good.

Like Shiko, Cerulean, and others, I also joined Fuwa this year (which is hard to believe! It kinda feels like I've always been here) - that was certainly the biggest VN event of the year for me. It's been great meeting you all! Only one of my friends is an otaku, and he's basically a shounen anime guy, so I don't get a lot of opportunity to talk about this sort of stuff with anybody else. I love being part of a friendly, welcoming community that keeps a good mix of serious conversation and messing around, open critique and well-deserved praise, and all centered around this hobby that I don't have any other outlet for. So, thanks everybody! And I suppose I should call out the VNs I read this year that were special for me. I'm pretty new to VNs, so of course they're mostly (entirely?) old classics. I thoroughly enjoyed each of these, but I won't ramble on about them here; if you want to see that, go dig up my chatter in the What Are You Playing thread or the corresponding Reading Club thread: Symphonic Rain, Comyu, Fate/Stay Night, and Sekien no Inganock. It's worth mentioning that three of the four of those were part of the Reading Club, and though I probably would have read Symphonic Rain even if it hadn't won, I probably wouldn't have picked up the other two if not for that Reading Club. So, it seems the revival of the reading club this year was also a pretty big event for me. Here's to hoping we have another reading club revival next year!

ADVICE: Never... ever... NEVEREVER... read any of The Song of Ice and Fire books (also known as Game of Thrones due to the popularity of the HBO show based off of the books, as only Book One was called Game of Thrones). That would be good advice, except for the premise that Eclipsed has to like the character before he cries. George R. R. Martin doesn't write any likeable characters, so it should be fine.