Getsuya

Ask her if she'd like to come give a presentation at the local International Relations Association I work for about her home country and maybe cook some of her country's traditional dishes. It'd be great. I'm sure a ton of people would show up to hear all about... Transylvania?

Though I have sworn off video games (aside from VNs), I may break that rule just so I can get a PS4 to play Persona 5 and Silent Hills (if it turns out to be good). I mean, quitting video games is one thing, but Persona 5 and a new, good Silent Hill are something else. They don't count.

Eustia is great! I'm definitely going to be posting up either a route-by-route or full game review once I'm through it. About Grisaia, is it the kind of story where I'm going to want to read all 3 games back-to-back, or could I stagger them with like one other game in between each Grisaia game? I'm semi-confident in my ability to grasp hard Japanese, but I think with Dies/RuiTomo/OreTsuba I could just pick them up, see if I can handle them, and if I can't just fall back on something else and shelf them until I feel ready. A good fall-back option would be White Album 2 or Fate/Stay, both of which are dirt cheap so I wouldn't feel bad buying them along with one of the hard games. Can't believe how expensive Dies Irae is... nearly $80 for a digital PSP game? Jeez. Beato, thanks for the additions but sadly neither Saihate nor Akagoei is available digitally through the PS Store. I'll definitely want to get around to them some day, but for now I'm focusing on stuff I can grab on my Vita alone. Kinda sad too, since I actually owned Akagoei Trinity for my PS3 before I sold off my whole game collection. I have played Utawarerumono though! It's one of the few (like, I can count on one hand few) VNs I've read through so far. Great stuff. Cross Channel IS available on Vita though, and I'm not sure how I missed that one for my list. It's definitely going to be one I get though. Right now, I'm thinking the list should go Grisaia after Higurashi, then a combination of one of the hard games+one of the cheap games. So like RuiTomo+White Album 2 or Dies Irae+Fate/Stay (I figure if I pair them up like that the fallback will be a good replacement for its 'hard' partner). After that I want to hit some yuri stuff but from what I've read of the Flowers reviews I probably want to do the nursing games (the Hakuisei duo) first and push Flowers down in priority a bit. Keep the suggestions coming folks this is seriously helping me out!

This is definitely the case. Translators tend to sign up for projects when they have a lot of free time, but when some projects last over a year (actually almost all of them do) it often turns out that a few months down the road they don't have nearly as much time as they thought they would. A guy who doesn't need to worry about working anymore would be the perfect candidate for a long, dedicated VN translation but those don't exactly grow on trees. Maybe VN makers should just write shorter VNs

Hakuisei Renai Shoukogun. A non-ero lesbian VN about nurses that was written with actual Japanese nurses on the staff to make sure everything was accurate to what I would almost call a bizarre degree. It has an encyclopedia for internal/medical terms for heaven's sake. Not to mention it's an adorable pure love story set among an ER-like medical drama setting. A sequel is coming out soon for the Vita which deals more with nursing school than with the real job, and it looks to be another winner. This was an amazing hidden gem for the PSP and PC that really deserves a translation so the poor shoujo-ai community can have another non-ero novel to their name (at the moment they have... I think part of Akai Ito... and nothing else). I actually personally know the guy who was working on a translation for this but he lost all motivation when the site the translation was being hosted at died out, swallowing all the work he had done. I seriously doubt anyone will do an official localization, but if there were one project I would clamor loudly for it's this.

Thank you! It will be slow going, building one game at a time each time I finish the one I'm reading, but I hope in a few years to have all the really good Vita VNs covered.

There's just too much good stuff on the Vita. I have a basic wish list drummed up, but I have no idea what game I should prioritize getting. See I can only read one at once, and I intend to buy these one at a time and read them to completion before picking up the next game. So this is a list I'm going to be going down very slowly and surely. What I don't want to happen is for the amazing gold-plated incredible games to get shoved down on the list so I might never get to them while going through a few games that, while good, just aren't as good. I'm fairly new to VNs, truth be told, and haven't really experienced too many myself, so I'm just going by general reputations in making my wishlist, I don't actually know where any of these stand in quality when compared with each other. But enough talking, here's the list. General suggestions like 'You NEED to make this one of your first picks' or 'Eh, don't be in any hurry to read this this or this' or more dedicated things like 'Here's the order you should get these all in' would be greatly appreciated. Also if you know of any VNs that are on the Vita (aside from the Dangan Ronpas which I have covered (and VLR which I played on 3ds)) that you don't see on my list that really, really should be please let me know. Assume I haven't read any of the VNs on my list yet. Because I haven't. Now Playing Aiyoku no Eustia Angel's Blessing Next Purchase Higurashi Sui (this is as far as I've planned things out) The Wishlist Rui ga Tomo wo Yobu Oretachi ni Tsubasa ha Nai R Fate/Stay Night Realta Nua Fate/Hollow Ataraxia Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai Grisaia Trilogy Flowers Irotoridori no Sekai Rewrite Steins;Gate Hakuisei Renai Shoukogun (PSP, can be bought digitally) Hakuisei Aijou Isonshou White Album 2 Chaos;Head Dual (Includes Chaos;Head and Chaos;Head Noah) Golden Time Imasugu Oniichan ni Imouto datte iitai! (my Japanese buddies have strongly recommended this to me for some reason, I don't know anything about it) Furuiro Meikyuu Rondo Kajiri Kamui Kagura (apparently same series as Dies Irae which I should also play at some point if they have a digital version of the PSP port) See this is like... kid in a candy store kind of thing up in here. I have no idea where to even start (aside from Higurashi of course). Almost all of these are just names, to me, and maybe some cover art. I know barely anything about them. I know VNDB has some basic stories and stuff for each of them and a general spread of ratings (which tend to be all over the place) but I'd love some actual intel on any of these that should be bumped to the top of the list. Incidentally (and I'll probably bring this up somewhere outside of a recommend thread) I'm thinking of doing a running review blog called Livin la Vita Loca focusing on reviewing all these wonderful all-ages Vita games.

It increases the difficulty of reading through it in Japanese manyfold so yes I really need voice acting to get through these games. If they were in English I wouldn't care.

Satoko. The fragile haughty lady veneer she puts up just makes her more adorable for how easily shattered it is by small things. She pulls pranks on others just to get attention because she is the loneliest girl ever. And when she's dere she's super ultra cuddly dere. I don't know if you could call her the 'ultimate' or anything, since she's not a very stereotypical tsundere, but if you're asking me who I think is the 'best' tsundere...

http://www.siliconera.com/2014/09/22/final-fantasy-xv-will-feel-like-group-guys-going-road-trip/ Also http://www.siliconera.com/2014/10/02/final-fantasy-xv-wont-let-change-characters-battle/ On the one hand 'road trip with my bros' doesn't exactly capture the majesty one would expect from a FF plot, on the other hand good action RPGs are few and far between so I'll probably get one of my friends to buy it and play it at their place. Squeenix seems to be very over-reactionary to customer complaints, I mean let's look at their recent decisions FF13 comes out Fans: It's too linear! All the characters but Fang are horrible! Square: Alright let's make a super open-ended game and... wait who was Fang? Was she the female Cloud? No? The loli? No? Oh she must have been that other loli (Serah). Okay we'll make a game about her. FF13-2 comes out Fans: Well the open-endedness was good but... oh God the characters! Why? Could you please give us an FF with a main character we like? Square: Well obviously that means a game about Lightning. FF13-3 comes out Fans: WHY ARE YOU SO HORRIBLE AT FEMALE CHARACTERS!!? Square: Oh, okay, we'll make our next FF a sausage-fest then Fans: As long as Cid has boobs! Square: Your wish is our command.

No worries there. I'm living in Japan and using a Japanese Vita. I've got all them all-ages VNs right at my fingertips.

Okay can we at least agree that GotoP, who did the art for the Clannad sidestory games on PSP, is a very good artist who absolutely knocked it out of the park? I don't care one way or the other about Key art (it was only an issue when playing stuff like Kanon with H scenes and thinking 'no I really, really don't want to see these girls naked thanks' which inadvertently probably lead to my current love of all-ages stuff) but GotoP does good stuff and Key should hire him to do a whole original game.

There is an image floating around that I can't find anywhere of the cover from A Bug's Life with Nagisa from Clannad. Cuz' they look like insects, see. They've got insect-proportioned head/eye ratios. It would be funnier if I could show you rather than trying to explain it. Anyway I guess it's not so much that Clannad and Kanon are old, it's that their art didn't change a bit from the time before they were Key, back during One and Moon. I guess back then they just grabbed whatever artist they could and after their writing made them popular they just kept the same guy in charge of art.

As Higurashi and Umineko have shown us, good stories can make up for poor art. Or Fate/Stay. One thing I think a lot of people forget is how ridiculously old these games are. Little Busters and Rewrite are at least kind of recent... Clannad is over a decade old, and Kanon came out before the turn of the century. They were old way before we even got their anime and they started spreading around out West. Compare them to their contemporaries and I think they'll look at least a little better than they do if you try comparing them to more modern VNs.

I finally made it through the ridiculously long prologue of Aiyoku no Eustia (the all-ages version on Vita). It was... long. I mean holy cow. I've read the Wheel of Time series and I thought those books went a little overboard on their prologues but when I finally got to the end of the prologue in this game I was convinced I was actually seeing the end of one of the main routes, like a bad end or something. But nope, that's just the intro chapter done! Time to watch the opening theme!... 8 hours in! That said I do not regret the time I spent and I'm totally looking forward to reading the main story now. I love the setting and the characters and the music and the writing and the art. Well, I love the way the characters are written and I think they're all strong, believable characters, but I'm not really that interested in pursuing romance with Eustia or Eris. Eris is fun to talk to but her personality just rubs me the wrong way. Eustia... is a tough one. Her voice is cute sometimes but most of the time it's just a little too breathy and squeaky so it comes across as really annoying, especially when she's apologizing all the time. Chronic apologizers are one of my least favorite tropes in VNs/anime. And Eustia just has this kind of passive-aggressive way of whining out of nowhere, like she'll be talking and suddenly say "And my master used to beat me, hehe" while still smiling. Maybe in a game where everyone was living a normal life except Eustia that would be fine, but EVERYONE in this game has a horrible life, so it gets frustrating how much Eustia tries to milk people's sympathy. Now obviously she has a good reason to be doing this which is why I say she's very well written as a character. She's just not a character I'd ever think about romancing, which kind of depresses me since she's obviously the 'true route' of the game (it is named after her after all). No, I like Fione. Fione is awesome. I'm not sure about the Saint girl or the princess since I haven't really met them yet aside from one or two scenes with the Saint girl being mysterious and holy and stuff, so I can't weigh in on them yet. But Fione is awesome. Actually if we're being really honest I wish the true route ended with Caim hooking up with Seig. Yowza. Anyway. Great writing, great music, great atmosphere, great pacing, great game.

http://lparchive.org/ I get all my LP needs from Something Awful. The above is an archive of most of their completed LP threads, current ones require a membership at the Something Awful forums to read (and subsequently to watch since most of their Youtube stuff is hard to find unless you've got links right to it, all of which are in the threads). There's kind of a weird disconnect between Something Awful and the mainstream/popular LPers on Youtube. SA will basically drum you out of town if you try to put a facecam in anything, and they tend to hate on reactionary 'watch me play this freaky game blind!' stuff, preferring instead well thought-out LPs that focus on highlighting the game as opposed to making a career for a Youtube superstar. Though on the outside it seems elitist and sometimes they can be a little mean about things, the truth in the end is that they make REALLY good LPs and their efforts have brought a lot of big games to light (Dangan Ronpa anyone?). I mean, Yahtzee (the guy who does Zero Punctuation) himself made an LP on Something Awful (more than one, I think). And often producers of games will drop in to comment on the LPs (Something Awful has an absolutely insane range of subscribers from idiot trolls to big names in a lot of industries... it's bizarre). ANYway I heartily recommend at least checking out the Archive if you want some real high quality LPs in either Screenshot or Video format. If folks want more specific recommendations I can give you a few of the more notable ones from SA history. Edit: Incidentally the LP Archive currently houses 1560 completed LPs.

In the Aksys blog they recently posted that they were working on something secret and had a picture of a red... blanket or something, pointing out that it was red. This could be completely unrelated, but since it's from only 2 or so days ago I can't imagine them having 2 big secret announcements they're cooking up so close together. So. Our clues are 'Red', some image of a red blanket/cloth, and 0303. And 4infinity

It doesn't really matter what they market it as. What matters is whether it gets on Steam or not. Honestly the success of any PC game is basically determined by whether it gets on Steam or not in this day and age. Sakura Spirit/Angel are proof that any crap that looks anime that gets on Steam gets bought (often ironically or for 'so bad it's good' reasons but who cares sales are sales) and hell Compile Heart/IF junk like Agarest are probably doing fine now that they have Steam versions. Neptunia probably will too once that hits Steam. It really is the be all end all of PC games nowdays. Either they need to focus on doing whatever they need to to get their game on Steam, or openly admit that they just honestly don't like money very much.

Hey I'm up in Yamagata but I tend to slide down to Tokyo/Akiba during Golden Week so it'd be cool to meet up then. I usually crash at a Capsule Hotel (there's one a stop or two from Akiba that has a pretty cool arcade right next to it I found last time I went down so I tend to stay there) but Akiba's kind of daunting to go into alone so I'd love to have someone to walk around with this Golden Week. Edit: Especially if you can point me to a shop that sells old card games. One of my bizarre hobbies is collecting old card games that no one plays anymore, so I've been searching for a place to buy stuff like Clamp in Cardland, Aquarian Age, and other classic TCGs like that. Last time I went I had no luck, but I figure there's just got to be a card shop in Akiba that caters to classic collectors like me.

I played through all of Conception 1 on the PSP (before I was a Vita fanboy I was a PSP fanboy so I covered a lot of bases on there). I thought the girls were okay and I had fun talking to some of them, but the relentlessly repetitive and grindy dungeons turned me off. I essentially went through the game without looking at it, watching TV while holding directions and auto-battling to get through all the dungeons. By the end I didn't even bother turning auto off for boss fights. I saw one ending with one of the girls and called it good. Now I'm kind of trying to avoid playing actual game games and just stick to reading VNs, so I probably won't get around to Conception 2.

Yay Vita VN buddies!

So much want. Sui is definitely going to be my 2nd Vita VN after Eustia. Ryuukishi07 seems to have a talent for making characters who are both endearing and make you want to protect them while at the same time wanting to strangle them due to how annoying they are when they open their mouths (Satoko and Maria). I can't wait to finally experience the real Higurashi after having only seen the anime and read the manga.

You can also start a cool club with other newbies like me who also love all-ages games to death so you have folks to chat with on Skype and such about great, clean, wholesome VNs. Also I recommend getting a Vita because they are basically The Thing to have right now for all-ages VNs.

Mainly they're just mediocre and cheaply made. The writers don't really know what they're doing besides cribbing a bunch of tropes from your average VNs, and the artists are just kind of off doing their own thing. I guess my main problem was the disconnect between the art and the story, really. In Sakura Spirit one of the girls is clearly supposed to be much younger than the way they drew her. The main character switches from being super prissy and pure-hearted around the older sister to joking around about being in love with the younger sister to almost creepy levels. It's clear from the way he talks to the younger sister that he thinks of her (at first) as being way too young to seriously be considering, but in the art she's not even remotely young-looking so it just comes across as the main character bizarrely flip-flopping between two personalities, one pure and one creepy and weird. But what takes the cake is in Sakura Angel when the text says 'and then she grew wings out of her back' and the character potrait doesn't change. He sits there talking about her wings while she sits there with no wings whatsoever in the art. So, basically they're just budget titles and you get what you pay for.

Which do you think will run out first, the mediocre Steam VNs or the 'hilarious' joke reviews of them on their Steam pages? Reading those is more entertaining than the games themselves (having only experienced Sakura Spirits and part of Sakura Angel). (Also how do I join your faction person above me? I must belong to this faction)