fun2novel

Tamayura Mirai is the latest game by Azurite, the company behind Shinsou Noise and Akumade Kore wa.  Unlike the previous two, it is not a guro mystery.  Instead, it is a fantasy with an extremely similar setting to Monobeno (which had a great setting, even if the lolicon elements were outright disgusting).  It also shares a writer (Touta) with such excellent games as Kin'iro Loveriche, Floral Flowlove, Gin'iro Haruka, and Ojousama wa Gokigen Naname.  
Before I go any further, I want to speak as to why I compared the setting to Monobeno.  Fukano, the town/valley in which the story is set, is a backwater where youkai, humans, and deities coexist.  Folk traditions, such as deities within the home, are still alive and well, if not entirely understood (the death of the last folk shaman in the area ensured that, from what is said).  The protagonist's role is very similar to the role of the miko in Monobeno (keeping harmony and balance between the supernatural and mortal), and, though the younger generation isn't, a certain level of superstition remains in the older generation.  In addition, the protagonist's choice to live isolated in the mountains in a run-down and modified old Japanese school (think the school from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) also echoes the isolation of the protagonist's home in Monobeno.  That said, the atmosphere in the game isn't as severe as Monobeno's, though the protagonist's 'duty' is harrowing at times.
All that said, this is definitely its own game.  The general atmosphere is a bit somber, and the characters all have some kind of serious problem that leaves them a lot less at peace than they seem on the surface (the protagonist included).  The protagonist is a mage who wields runic magic (Norse shamanic style), and he has the role of keeping peace the mixed-origin supernatural community of Fukano, the setting.  He lives in an abandoned school in the mountains with a succubus named Midari, who has the dual problems of being afraid of men and deeply fearing her own nature (though her upbringing shows through at the oddest times).  At the school he attends, he frequently meets with a water spirit information broker named Hanako (one of the heroines).  Occasionally, he meets up with his oppai-loli 'oneechan' (who is very childish and has a really poorly-executed accent that just comes off all wrong in the VA...). 
The story begins with his encounter with Yukina, a girl with naturally high levels of spiritual energy who is completely untrained (and is thus a danger to herself and everyone around her, since youkai and monsters can gain power by eating such people, and others make assumptions about what she can do based on her spiritual power).  I won't go into details about their meeting, because this is a game best experienced the first time without too many preconceptions.
This is essentially a nakige, and it does a pretty good job of bringing out the tears.  The protagonist's duty often brings him into contact with situations where he must deal with various tragedies, sometimes from the present, sometimes from the past.  His own previous life isn't exactly bright and flowery either, lol.  The protagonist has a tendency to see himself as weak and selfish, but he has a seemingly endless capacity for getting obsessed with solving other people's problems... which actually makes him perfect for his work (considering the nature of the mountain deity and certain hints given during the common route, it is pretty clear that he was given his role specifically because of that tendency). 
The heroine routes, quite naturally, focus on the issues with the heroines... to be specific, dealing with the issues that bother them the most deeply.  Equally quite naturally, the first heroine I picked was Midari, the succubus.
Midari
Midari is a member of the succubus nobility who was exiled from her homeland because of her fear of men and inability to feed properly (essentially have sex with men...and lots of them, preferably).   Worse (from her perspective), she fell in love with the protagonist on their first meeting, thus dooming her in the eyes of her people and filling her with a constant conflict between her impulses and her love for the protagonist.
Midari has a very gentle and refined manner, and she has the grace that one would expect from a noblewoman...  However, on occasion, she makes remarks (usual casual references to sex acts or her sisters and mother's sluttiness) that reveal rather blatantly that she isn't human and her basic upbringing wasn't either.  Her path is all about dealing with her internal conflict and its real-world consequences... and this leads to a lot of nice emotional drama and a decent catharsis... though, to be honest, the cathartic scenes two-thirds of the way through the common route were better.
Hanako
For those who understand the reference, yes Hanako does hang around in the girls' toilet.  Hanako is a water youkai that came over from China six hundred years before the story began and eventually rose to become one of the top figures of all the water youkai in Fukano.  She is actually pretty powerful, and she serves as an information broker for Mutsuki (the protagonist) as he performs his duty as the Mage of Fukano. 
Hanako's route is a weird one and it isn't as emotional as Midari's route was.  To be honest, a large part of the reason why is that the relationship part starts really quickly and feels somewhat forced...  Hanako has a reason to like Mutsuki, but Mutsuki doesn't really have a good reason to fall in love with her, so it feels weird.  This is in opposition to Midari, who has been at his side for some time when the story began and is insanely devoted to his well-being (not to mention sexy and graceful at the same time, lol).  This route could have been handled much better by using a tactic similar to the Midari route, where they become closer during the course of him carrying out his duties... unfortunately, the way the route was handled was sadly inept for such a potentially interesting heroine.
Yukina
Yukina is a young woman with a natural gift for the use of spiritual power (so much so that she can attack youkai with her bare hands and blasts of raw energy).  Her characterization is a straight out tsundere, so anyone who reads this VN with some experience with the character type will probably be able to predict her reactions in most situations.  I started laughing at a few points when she said something so typically tsundere that I couldn't believe any writer would still use the lines...lol
Yukina's route is all about her personal issues, both her past and her present ones.  I do feel that this route's romance was far too hurried (like Hanako's) in the sense that their relationship should have had more time to develop into something deeper before things began to accelerate.  
That said, the actual events after the romance solidifies are well-written and described, and you gain a lot more insight into Mutsuki's motivations and the depth of his personality than you do in the other paths.  I recommend this path be read after the other two heroines available at the beginning, simply because the revelations made here are too overarching to allow you to truly enjoy the other paths without reservation.
Shiro
Shiro is the protagonist's loli-oppai oneechan, who speaks with a weird houben (regional accent) that is poorly used by the VA to the point of being wince-worthy (yes, this is worth mentioning again).  
Shiro and Mutsuki's issues are the core of everything that has shaped Mutsuki to be the person he is.  As such, it was only natural that Shiro would end up as the true path heroine... indeed, her path begins after the end of a non-romantic Yukina path.  I'm not going to spoil what those issues are, but I should note that Shiro was the motivation that drove Mutsuki to become a magus. 
In the setting, magi are seekers of forbidden truths, similar in some ways to the magi of the Nasuverse save that they don't seem to have a large-scale organization or influence on the mundane world.  As such, they frequently take actions that are amoral in the pursuit of their path of research, and many naturally think in ways that are out of sync with humanity.   The Mage of Fukano is a rare exception, in that the deities of Fukano have made a role for the holder of the position in the natural existence of the valley and mountains.
Mutsuki's path of research is about as immoral as it gets, even if he still has a conscience and his motivations come from a very human place.  As such, it takes a central role in the major dilemma of the path, as anyone who has read Yukina's path would guess anyway. 
In the end, this was the path (other than the common route) which drew out the most tears from me.  Shiro and Mutsuki's story is full of sorrow but ends with joy, so I can honestly say this falls into the classic 'nakige' style. 
Conclusions
I have a few things left I want to say before bowing out on this game.  First, I wanted a Feles (Mephistopheles) route, since Feles is ridiculously deredere (in a yandere way) over the protagonist.  Another issue is that I thought that leaving the protagonist's deeper issues out of Midari's and Hanako's paths was something of a poor choice.  Yukina is presented as a mirror to the protagonist as well as a heroine, so it is understandable that she would play such a vital role for setting up the true path.  However, I felt that failing to properly deal with his personal issues in either of those two paths was a mistake.  Mutsuki does have VERY serious issues that can't really be glossed over... not to mention that I seriously doubt Midari's issues would end just with what we saw in the path (living with a succubus in a state of perpetual near-starvation will inevitably have its ups and downs). 
 
 

First, for those who are familiar with me... Yes, I did play this.  Why?  Something about the way it was presented in the Getchu page said that there was more hidden beneath the surface than a standard oppai-nukige.  Thankfully, my instinct was correct, in this case.
Now, for those who are curious, this game is a straight-out harem, from beginning to end.  This game's primary attractions are the comedic reactions of the heroines and the way they and the protagonist slowly 'fall'.  It is like watching a train wreck in slow motion... it is too fascinating to look away from, yet you know it is going to end badly, lol.
The protagonist, Yuki, is a somewhat hetare-ish guy who does his best to disappear in the classroom and has trouble speaking to others.  One day, out of loneliness, he opens up the Tomefure app, where young guys offer young girls a place to stay for free without strings attached and signs up.  The girl who appears at his door is the class idol, Sakurako, who immediately crushes his hopes (sexual fantasies) and basically does her best to leech off of him, dragging a bunch of other girls into the mix.
This story is all about a bunch of young people too afraid to create real relationships or who have huge problems in their normal lives essentially huddling together and gradually becoming contaminated with this weird 'small community' Stockholm Syndrome thing.  I spent most of the game laughing or in a state of 'frustration' (yes, that kind of frustration), because the process of Yuki and the girls' morals collapsing takes a long time (despite being a kinetic novel, this game took me almost 20 hours to complete) and actual H and near-romance (there is no true romance in this game) doesn't get going until you are about 7/8 of the way through the game. 
In terms of writing, the basic quality of the main writer is pretty low.  I'd say he is somewhere below the baseline for charage writers, which is generally bad in any case.  That said, because of the way the 'story' is presented, his lack of writing skills doesn't create as much of a negative effect as it might otherwise, even in a charage. 
If you want a comedy ecchi harem VN to read, this is probably the best option you can find for the last three years.  The whole thing is so absurd that I couldn't help but laugh out loud (a real lol) on dozens of occasions.  Don't expect 'healthy' romance, since the whole story is based on the characters' gradually losing their common sense morality about relationships as they sleep in the same room (there is more to it, but I won't spoil you).  However, if you don't mind that kind of thing (or if you love it) this game is a fun read.
PS: Yes, I surprised myself with how much I got into this one.

For those familiar with me, you know I spent year after year doing VN of the Month and that I ritualistically complained about how tired I was of this or that trope or bad habit that plagued the industry or games.  I was asked repeatedly why I could still plow through so many VNs, despite the stress?  The simple answer is that I have always been stubborn as hell.  I've experienced 'burnout' numerous times in my life, mostly because I have a naturally obsessive personality.  Once I start obsessing over something, I literally am incapable of ceasing to do so without something jarring me completely away from it for a time, which usually results in me realizing I burned out long ago and have just been hanging out of stubbornness. 
The same was the case for VNs.  When I first started playing VNs, all VNs were worth at least trying.  However, as time went on, I increasingly lost interest in most nukige and eventually my interest in 'everyday teenaged life SOL romance' (or 'the standard charage') began to fade.  It was probably about 2016 when this reached the critical point, but it took another year and a two-week bout of flu where I couldn't think well enough to play anything to bump me out of my years-long trance. 
Part of it was that I rarely, if ever, took a break from VNs during those years.  I was always playing at least one, and I had a tendency to barrel through them consecutively without even a short pause to rest, week after week, month after month.  I used  most of my free time to play them, I structured my work schedule and habits around playing them, and I generally existed solely to do so.
I dunno how many of you can even imagine what living like that is like... but it was the fact that I am no longer driven to play game after game that is letting me sit back and enjoy the few I actually want to play.  I go back and pull stuff out of my attic on a whim, I dig through my collection based on a desire to relive a single scene, and I generally just take pleasure in playing what I want to play.
Would it be strange for you to hear that this all feels unnatural to me, after all these years?  I've been playing third-rate charage I didn't want to even see, much less play, for years... and now I only play stuff that takes my interest, dropping them if I don't see any hope for the game to break out of the shell of mediocrity.  I don't feel driven to blog about replays beyond when I feel like it or when I think I have something to add to a previous assessment, and I can actually sit back and enjoy the few charage I actually feel like I want to play.
While I do have regrets, they aren't about the years spent obsessing and over-playing VNs, despite my previous words.  I set out to do VN of the Month because, at the time, there was no way for people to have an idea of what they were getting into with most VNs.  It was a bit startling how few people were seriously trying to let people know what kind of VNs were out there without spoiling everything from beginning to end.  Even today, most reviewers can't seem to keep heavy spoilers out of the text, which saddens me.  However, I no longer feel that it is my mission to 'fix' this.  I've been there, I've done that, and I won't be doing it again.
I will still play VNs, and I will still review them (on occasion), but don't expect me to be as prolific as I used to be, lol.

It has been almost six months since I ceased VN of the Month.  I can say now that while I do, surprisingly, miss some aspects of that particular column, the freedom giving it up has granted me is far greater compensation. 
When I was doing VN of the Month, I was literally the only person commenting on most of the non-nukige VNs in a given month.  I was driven by a sense of obligation to those who read my blog to continue regardless of what it was doing to me and my life, and I can say now that that wasn't a healthy situation for me. 
I am still a VN addict.  I probably always will be, just as I am a heavy reader in general and a lover of role-playing games.  However, I still think the role I put it on myself to play was a necessary one.
How many people who play untranslated VNs give honest opinions devoid of spoilers?  For that matter, how many of them are honest about their biases when they feel they can't give a particular VN a fair chance? 
I made myself abide by a pretty strict set of rules when I was doing VN of the Month.
 One was that I would primarily evaluate VNs based on story, character development, and setting, while only mentioning visual and audio elements when they were obviously exceptional.  My reason for this is that I lack the background to properly evaluate the technical aspects of audio-visual materials, whereas I have extensive experience with all sorts of reading material in general and fiction in particular. 
Another was that I would, on a regular basis, restate my particular biases, reminding people of the limitations of my objectivity.  This was because I was writing on all VNs I played for the first time, and it would have been unfair for me to fail to state my biases beforehand when playing something that was outside my tastes or something that hit them spot on.
The third was a resolve to avoid excessive spoilers.  My standard was the Getchu page.  If information was released on the Getchu page or the official site, I didn't consider it to be a spoiler, but I was to avoid spoiling things beyond that, except when absolutely necessary.
The fourth and final rule was to strive for objectivity inasmuch as possible and be honest with myself and my readers when it wasn't possible. 
These rules were my guide posts for the years I did VN of the Month, and they served me well, generally... but I reached my limit.  To be blunt, VN of the Month was only made possible because of my high reading speed and my willingness to structure my life solely around playing VNs and making money to buy more.  Naturally, this way of doing things was doomed to failure eventually, but I got so caught up in actually doing it that I didn't notice it really at the time.
Now, I play only what I want to play, and that makes me a much happier person, despite a few wistful moments where I wonder if I couldn't have done it a little while longer.

Sakura, Moyu is the latest game by Favorite, the producers of Hoshimemo and the Irotoridori series.  For those who aren't yet familiar with Favorite, I should tell you that there are three things this company is known for.  For one, they produce first-class 'nakige' in a unique style full of pastel colors and manipulation of visual and narrative perspectives.  Second, they are known for their excellent stories and characters, regardless of which writer they have on the job.  Last of all, they are known for being lolicons (lol).  No, I'm not kidding.  The fact that every one of their true heroines at least looks like a loli at first glance says everything, hahahaha.
Sakura, Moyu was written by Urushibara Yukito, the same writer as the Irotoridori games.  As such, it should surprise no one that the setting is layered and complex and the story not at all what it seems on the surface.  It should also surprise no one that there is a lot of emotionality in this game... but I don't think anyone was expecting just how emotional this game is.  To be blunt, I spent roughly 80% of this game either on the verge of or in tears.  Considering that the game is one of the longest games I've ever played (at least partially so because I so thoroughly relished Urushibara's writing style), that's a lot of tears... and a lot of tissues *glances at the overfull wastebasket next to his pc and the empty tissue boxes lying around it*. 
However, there are some issues with this game that need to be mentioned to get them out of the way.  Few games are perfect, and this one is no exception.  To be specific, Urushibara has always been mediocre at the romantic elements of his games.  Unless the romance exists at the end of a path full of suffering and despair or occurs in an incredibly stressful situation, he can't seem to write it very well (in other words, he is good at dramatic love but only a bit less than average at everyday love).  As a result, the romance in the first two paths (Chiwa's and Hiyori's) feels abrupt and forced... not to mention the fact that the beginning of Chiwa's path is so at odds at first with the game's atmosphere that I had to put the game down for two days to get past the emotional disconnect it created.  Hiyori's path is somewhat less problematic but still feels forced and abrupt, so I'm basically saying that readers who have high hopes for romance in these two paths will probably be disappointed, at least to an extent. 
One other issue that always nags at you as you play the numerous paths is the treatment of Kuro, the game's true heroine... to be blunt, like all of the Favorite true heroines, the story is set up so that if you aren't on her path, she gets screwed over to one extent or another.  Now, if you don't instantly fall in love with Kuro during the opening scenes, like I did, this might not be a problem for you, but one reason I spent the end of every path in tears and couldn't empathize with the characters' happiness was precisely because of this.
This game is very much a story of self-sacrifice... to the extent that it feels like every time you turn around, someone is sacrificing something for the sake of someone else.  The creatures of the Night (the underworld-like dream realm the characters fought in ten years before the story's beginning) are, as is openly stated, driven to feel unconditional love for humans, and as such, their excessively kind hearts spend much of this game suffering as a result of human actions and the tendency of humans to disregard their own happiness at the oddest of times.  
This is also a game full of loneliness... to a degree that 'loneliness' or 'lonely' (さみしさ and さみしい) are the two most common words in the game by an exponential level.  All of the main characters in this game suffer from loneliness to one degree or another at some point.  Some take it on of their own will, others have it inflicted upon them, and yet others endure it because it is their fate.  As such, there are very few points outside of the relatively few standard SOL scenes (compared to the game's over length) where the game isn't somber in atmosphere.
This game is also unbelievably layered and complex... so much so that it reminds me of games like Harumade Kururu and Ever17 in retrospect.  It has been a long time since a writer managed to keep me so thoroughly in the dark about so much of the game's general story for so long (the last time was Bradyon Veda), and, in that sense, I'm grateful for this game's existence.
I do, in fact, like how it all (the main story) ends, and I even liked how each of the individual paths ended, taken by themselves (If i ignore how Kuro gets screwed over).  I also found myself to be completely satisfied once I finished the game... to the extent that I don't think I'll ever be able to replay this game.  This game was very high stress in the sense that I was constantly being bombarded with the characters' emotions, and as such, it isn't a game that would be easy to come back to any time soon.  The sheer length of the game also adds to this. 
In conclusion, this is a game that is worthy of the legacy of Favorite as a company, worthy of being the first mainline project since the release of AstralAir in 2014.  It has problems and the game is probably one that is emotionally stressful.  However, for catharsis addicts, it is a worthy addition to their collection of nakige and utsuge, lol.

First, I should note the reasons why I keep playing Venus Blood games, despite not being fond of tentacles in general and rape in particular.   The first reason is that the story and characters in each game have been exceedingly interesting, which is a good enough reason in and of itself.  However, the second reason, and the one that makes this series stand out, is the sheer depth of the gameplay most games in the series since Frontier have displayed.
I played Empire and Abyss first, and, to be honest, they aren't really that impressive as games go.  The stories were good and I liked the characters, but if you were to ask me if the gameplay was all that memorable, my answer would be no.  However, it was with Frontier that I first experienced the need to truly delve the depths of the series' system of skills and unit building (as opposed to just randomly gathering units that seemed to go together and relying on the hero characters, like i did in Empire, lol).  This system is one where you are rewarded for putting together good combinations of units, rather than randomly putting together a force of OP units.  Most units have a role they are particularly suited for, and there are dozens of different factors to take into account when picking what units to recruit and put in a squad. 
Venus Blood Lagoon came out at the end of last year, and it is already being billed as the hardest game in a series known for high difficulty levels (as opposed to the impossible ones frequently present in SofthouseChara games, where the gameplay is frequently unmanageable altogether).  If you have played a VB game before, I suggest that you consider normal difficulty to be the hard difficulty of most other VB games, at least in part due to the limitations of the hero units this time around.
Most people who just like to play VB games once or twice (to get both paths or different endings) develop a habit of building all their units around their hero units.  Part of this is because Hero units in past games have been more than powerful enough to form the core of a central squad each, meaning that it is perfectly workable to rely on them at least up through hard difficulty.
Lagoon, however, punishes this tendency at times.  Part of the reason for this is that this game has a ridiculous number of dragon units compared to previous titles.  As a result, you get a lot of units that have half-assed builds that don't stand out when compared to late-game recruitable units.  There is a lot of crossover between unit types, creating a tendency toward all-rounders in a game where it is generally better to specialize in a single role (which is why Zahack and Tia stand out, since Zahack is DPS all the way and Tia is a perfect tank).  A classic example of this is Ain, who, for all that he looks cool, is actually fragile and weak in comparison even to mid-game units, at least in part because they made him too much of an all-rounder without giving him the stats and skill levels to pull it off.  Eden also stands out in the same way, turning out to be a decent tank, even though her skillset and stated class say she should be DPS. 
Despite the class names, there are really three major roles and a few sub-roles in this game.  The main roles are Tank, DPS, and Support (not used in-game).  Tank units should be kept in the first slot and possibly the second to serve as a wall between the rest of the unit and enemy damage.  Ideally, they should have a nice set of skills that make them hard to damage or hit (there are a number of such skills) and/or allow them to retaliate with something nasty when someone does attack them (counter-tanks and passive tanks are the two types you can pursue in this game, dependent on skillsets).  DPS units generally have high attack (duh) stats as well as skills that make them more effective at dealing damage, such as skills that reduce enemy defenses, boost their own damage, or allow them to spread damage across multiple units.  Support units are units that exist to provide boosts, defenses against bombardment, and healing.  The rule of thumb in all VB games is to abuse the 活性 and other booster skillsets to create units that have massively boosted stats to deal disproportionate amounts of damage to the enemy.  While this tactic isn't quite as effective as it has been in previous games, it is still the most important basic element of building a squad. 
The major sub-role you should keep in mind is the Treasure-Hunter squad.  This type of squad has a different role than the average 'smash and invade' squad type.  To be specific, all units in such a squad should have boosted loot-related passive skills and equipment to increase the amount of drops after a battle.  Ideally, you should pair such squads with more powerful smasher squads to maximize loot gain and minimize the possibility of the treasure-hunter squads being wiped out.  If you want the resources to build up your army on your first playthrough, doing without Treasure-hunting squads is not an option.
Now, down to the meat of things... this game channels Hypno's system down to the letter.  The Legion system, which allows you to move and deploy up to three units in a single battle, has returned... meaning that tactics have become more advanced and you are faced with a need to create far more squads than is the norm in most games in the series (I had fifteen squads fully formed and leveled by the end, with three on the back burner to make a full eighteen).  Part of this is that you can't avoid creating a wide battlefront in this game if you want to get high after-battle ratings.  Another part is that some units just do horribly against certain enemy squad builds.
The Main Route
This game's story begins with Tia's homeland of Elysses being destroyed by Gashel, the High Priest of the Divine Dragons (which included Elysses and its mostly human subjects).  Tia's brother, Julian, sacrifices his life and resurrects the Demon Lord Zahack, the powerful being that once faced off against the Original Dragon, Eden.  Zahack, even weakened by his long sleep, manages to get Tia away, and he forms a contract with her to help her get her revenge against Gashel.
Now, the main story of the game is focused on Tia's journey to gain revenge, but I should note that there are a number of points that differ from previous titles, story-wise.  First, the protagonist, Zahack, is an assistant and ally rather than the overall leader of things.  Zahack is a demon to the core, and his focuses are on the fulfillment of his contract, sex, and fun in general (not necessarily in that order), while Tia is an idealistic young woman constantly at war with herself as her idealistic nature and compassion conflict with her burning desire for revenge and growing addiction to tentacle sex (lol, yes, that is an issue, as it usually is in VB games). 
To be blunt, in most previous titles, this protagonists tended to relatively easily force the heroines into submission (even the story battles tended to end with the heroines on their knees in relatively short periods of time once the protagonist's plans were complete).  However, this game is one where nothing ever goes perfectly and plans frequently have to be adjusted or abandoned entirely due to circumstance and the fortunes of war.  Tia is a good leader, but she is very clearly the one at a disadvantage from the very beginning.  While she desires revenge, she is also kind by nature and not naturally pragmatic or ruthless as VB protagonists generally are.  Zahack is generally willing to go along with her, as her struggles amuse him, lol. 
The Law Route
I managed to get the true Law ending on my first try (happily), so I can honestly stay that the Law route has a lot to recommend to it for people who like more classic 'not evil' paths (calling the characters 'good' when most of them are mass murderers or using their own children as weapons of war is a bit of a stretch).  There is an enemy worth defeating, a goal worth reaching, and the actual writing is perhaps the best in the series outside of Hypno.  Zahack himself grows somewhat (though Zahack is Zahack, lol), and Tia grows immensely as a person as she gets past her dark desires and finds a new path in life. 
The other characters also find themselves renewed as they face the new threats they had no way of knowing about at the beginning, and I actually found myself surprised at the antagonist, even if it followed the usual VB path of being a somewhat standard/archetypical choice in retrospect.  This is also the first game in the series where I honestly couldn't find a connection with another game that has come out before, so I have to wonder if they are intending on creating a time-distant sequel at some point...
I will play Chaos eventually... but tbh, it took me sixty hours to complete this game (about eighteen hours of that was just thinking about then building units and squads), so I think I'll put that off for a while.

After ten years playing VNs, you would think I would have completely lost faith in them by now, especially considering just how many I've played (744 not counting most of the nukige, replays and incomplete/dropped ones).  Most VNs that aren't nukige are SOL-fests that exist solely to promote nostalgic fantasies about life in high school and getting into bishoujos' pants... not that that is an entirely horrible goal, but it isn't something I want to see five hundred times over.
The romance is usually puerile and has no relation to reality, the characters have all their hard edges filed away by the needs of the archetype, and drama is used solely to add 'spice' (like one sprinkle of pumpkin spice, not cracked red pepper) to an otherwise endlessly sweet and bland recipe. 
So how is it that someone who has experienced that much essentially boring and pointless repetition of the same scenarios able to continue to enjoy VNs, even if he can't stand meaningless SOL anymore?
At one time, it was a sense of duty, a belief that I was doing the community good by digging gems out of the piles of crap that are the SOL genre.  I also had a sense of pride that I made an effort of objectivity that I have literally seen no one else attempt.  I played games no one else bothered with because they didn't have the time or patience, and I did it because I thought someone looking at the games would want to know what they were getting into.
I paid a price in a growing sense of bitterness, of boredom, and of a sense that I was forgetting the reason why I began to read fiction in the first place.  I paid a price in people continually being trolls and trying to draw me into fights over my opinions on these games.  I had people start reddits and send me pms being sympathetic about the very conversations they'd started (yes that happens). 
I also had people who respected what I was doing, and I knew there were people in the community who benefited from the fact that I was doing it.  I watched VNs I had pushed get localizations and fantls (usually to my surprise), and I saw others that I had labeled as mediocre get hyped to a ridiculous degree.   I tried to get other people to help with what I was doing, only to find that, without a reading speed similar to mine, it was too much of a burden on their lives and ate up the time to read the VNs they wanted to read. 
The bad generally outweighed the good immensely while I was doing VN of the Month, and even after, I found that the after-effects of my years of playing games I wasn't interested in personally had left me with scars I was unable to feel while my sense of duty was keeping me going. 
However, I can say that I still haven't given up on VNs.
Why? 
The reason is ridiculously simple and at the same time profound (at least to me).  I love the medium.  For someone who likes an experience that combines the reading, visual input, and music without the need for a lot of input from the one experiencing it, VNs provide a unique storytelling experience.  Books are great for the imagination and can send our souls exploring across landscapes that exist only in our own minds, but VNs provide a more filled-out framework for those who don't necessarily have the imagination to fill in all the gaps on their own, without rotting the imagination to the degree manga and anime do.  I've been able to get people who had trouble reading books into VNs, then led them straight back to books and opened the world of imagination to them.  I've seen people who had begun to feel the otaku community offered nothing more to them come alive again after playing a chuunige or a charage.  I've picked up a random moe-looking VN and found a deep and compelling story that remains within me dozens of times.
In the end, it is moments, experiences like that that keep me coming back, believing in the possibilities of VNs even now.  It is the desire to find more such experiences that keeps me looking at new releases each month, and it is the belief that those experiences will never entirely vanish that keeps me from condemning the industry as a whole for the way it sabotages itself at times. 

Paradise Lost was the first game in Masada's/Light's 'Shinza series (Paradise Lost>Dies Irae>Kajiri Kamui Kagura).  For the sake of those who read Dies Irae but still don't understand how this universe/setting works, I'll explain it in a spoiler box at the end of the post. 
Paradise Lost is based in the ruins of a city once called Sodom, now the Quarantine City, a city full of poisonous miasma that causes death and mutation in its inhabitants, a city sealed from the outside world by an impenetrable barrier, a city where Darwinism is the only law.  All the denizens of that city are beasts, monsters who combine human cruelty with the lack of restraint of an animal.  In that city, a man, sometimes named Lyle, at others Nacht, and at yet others Death Scythe, walks the streets of the darkest, most toxic area of the city, stained with the blood of those unfortunate enough to encounter him.
That's my intro to one of Paradise Lost's two protagonists, Lyle.  In a city where everyone is out for themselves, with no pretense of anything else, Lyle is a living legend, a monster who kills simply because he can, because he feels like it.  Always at war with his even more violent alternative ego, Nacht, he searches for a past lost so long ago that it was forgotten by time itself.  Frozen in place for years, time begins to move forward when he encounters the angel Ririel deep in the depths of the Dead Zone.
The other protagonist, Knowe Christ, is a bit more comprehensible from the average human perspective.  He is a young man who is on the lowest rung of the Quarantine City's societal ladder.  Born with defects that make a life of violence impossible for him, he supports his adopted little sister Sophie by selling drugs and being a 'body chopper', selling his own body parts for enough money to feed them both.  He loves Sophie dearly, and she is the only thing keeping him sane in the abyss that is that city.
Paradise Lost is, like all Masada games, over the top and pretty much a perfect example of epic chuunige style (as opposed to the standard types, which are less melodramatic and grand in scale).  In some ways, this game avoids everything that Masada normally does poorly (namely slice-of-life) entirely.  It is pure story from beginning to end.  There is no conflict between daily life and the darker struggle, because the struggle is merely an extension of that daily life.  Both protagonists are dark by nature, though Knowe can be pretty frustrating for his surprising naivete (understandable, since he is a weakling by the standards of the city). 
This game has a lot of great fights and slaughter, and the actual story is pretty interesting.  Unfortunately, the visuals are dated (though still pretty cool) and the protagonists aren't voiced, both of which are negatives for a chuunige (you would have thought Light would have fixed that when they re-released the game).  There is only one truly good person in this entire VN (Ririel), and most of the characters in the game would be considered to be monsters by our moral standards.  Both inside and outside of the city the world is a huge dystopia, with merely the vector differing.
This game uses a lot of Christian apocrypha (as should be obvious, considering that Ririel is an angel) in the setting, but it is done in a way that should be pretty offensive to most Christians, lol (seriously, I don't think that Masada could have so thoroughly designed a blasphemous work even if he'd done so intentionally).
While there are six endings to the game, it should be noted that there are only two possible overall outcomes, with the only differences between them being whether the endings are focused on Knowe's side (and one of his two heroines) or Lyle's side.  Basically, the essential difference between the endings is determined by whether the antagonist succeeds or fails in his main goal (ironically, the antagonist succeeding creates the 'good' endings). 
Overall, this game is a great chuunige... but anyone who doesn't like chuunige won't like it, because there is literally nothing but chuunige content in this game.
 

This is a list of VNs I think are worthy of playing, regardless of my vndb vote (no VN of the Year, since I don't do VN of the Month anymore).  While I haven't been playing much since September, the fact remains that I still played a large number of VNs this year.  Feel free to object, but I have no obligation to listen anymore *whistles cheerfully as he juggles the flaming skulls of those who have opposed him in the past).
Fuukan no Grasesta
Mirai Radio no Jinkou-bato
Haru to Yuki (if I could say I'd played most of the games this year, this would be my VN of the Year choice)
Shin Koihime Musou Kakumei Son Go no Ketsumyaku
Maoten
Curio Dealer
Kimi to Hajimeru Dasantekina Love Come
Kimi to Mezameru Ikutsuka no Houhou
Butterfly Seeker
A.I. Love
Unjou no Fairy Tale
Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteiru: Trinkle Stars
Hataraku Otona no Ren'ai Jijou 2
Shogun-sama wa Otoshigoro
Hello, Lady Superior Entelecheia
I might add the new Venus Blood, depending on whether I come out on the other end feeling it was good, lol.

This is an opinion that has been a long time in forming, but I am coming around to an opinion that the more simplistic viewpoints I've possessed on the differences between American approaches to storytelling and Japanese ones are somewhat off the mark. Note:  This is a rant, it should be treated as a rant, and if it doesn't make sense to you, that is because it is my brain leaking into text on this blog.
First, my original opinion:
To put it simply, it was my belief that the Japanese had a tendency to go for emotional surrealism (in other words, emotional bombardment) and visual excess (exaggeration) to tell their stories.  In opposition, Americans tend to go for the 'gritty and realistic', with straight out bullet to the head realism.  This was a generalization that, while based on my experiences with Japanese video games that told a story (both VNs and jrpgs) and Western games that more or less tried to do the same (Isometric RPGs, Bethesda-style games, etc), was never meant to be an absolute statement but just a general opinion of the tendencies I'd encountered.
Second, my new opinion: 
First, I've come to the conclusion that American gaming companies don't know how to tell a story anymore (since Bioware has gone crappy, Obsidian is about to get absorbed/has been absorbed by a company that has no idea of what it is doing, and the Witcher was made by Polish people).  Second, the Japanese seem to suffer from a similar malaise... and the source is, quite ironically, fairly similar in the cases of mainstream games.
It is the disease I call the 'MMO virus'.  Yes, you who actually read my blog know my opinion on online multiplayer games and what they have done to erode storytelling games in general, but my recent conclusion is that this erosion has actually reached a critical point in the last five years.  Rebellions against the progression of this disease have occurred (Tales of Berseria, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and Nier: Automata come to mind for the Japanese, and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire for America), but these have been relatively minor upthrusts against the toxins released by the cloud of mission-based 'stories' you see in games nowadays.  Bethesda has also contributed to this plague (fetch quests and hunt the monster quests  being a common plague for them as well), and it seems like every time I turn around, I see another game trying to tell its story through an obvious mission or quest system is sitting right there.  Sure, the systems had their roots in D&D games, but the way they've developed is the result of the plague that infected the world using games like WoW as its vector.
I first began to see signs of this disease back in the PS2 era, though it was mostly limited to 'high end' games at the time, like Final Fantasy (XII having essentially repurposed and altered XI's MMO battle system for a single-player model), I was honestly horrified to see how easy it was to let myself get led around by the nose from objective to objective in hopes that I'd find the story in there somewhere.  The problem was, once the objectives became my reason for playing (as was inevitable, because that is the tactic they use to draw you in), I increasingly realized that I couldn't enjoy what story was being told, because I was impatient to get to the next objective, even though I didn't find any of that searching for objectives to be fun in the least.
VNs suffer from a different set of problems.  While jrpgs and western games suffer from the simple fact that the current generation of makers grew up obsessing over pathetic attempts to graft stories onto multiplayer games, VNs suffer from the fact that the best and brightest of their creators are... getting old.  Hell, some of them even died in between projects.  Worse, no one of equal capability has replaced them, leading to an unfortunate confluence of near-universal incompetence and corporate inability to grasp the reasons for failure and fix it. 
No, I'm not saying that all new VNs suck.  Hell, if they all sucked, I wouldn't still be trying to go back and play them, like the burnt-out junkie I am.  No, my issue is that there is a sudden dearth of developed talent within the world of VNs that has gotten horrible in the last five years.  Most of the major names are retired, have moved on to 'greater' things, or are dead.  Shumon Yuu is silent, Hino Wataru seems to have gone underground, Masada is probably off in his own little world, Fujisaki Ryuuta is circling in place, Kurashiki Tatsuya is off indulging his inner sadist with half-assed games, Kazuki Fumi can't seem to stick with one thing long enough to make it great since Akeiro Kaikitan, and Agobarrier is three years dead.  That isn't even mentioning all the formerly major names that have just decided to retire without telling anyone or got hired away by mainstream video game companies. 
What is replacing them are primarily LN writers... who, unfortunately, tend to write like middle school street kids on crack (and not in a good way).  They often have great ideas, but they are fuzzy about execution and lacking in technique.  As a result, you get a bunch of third-rate one-off VNs that no one really likes.
Artists aren't a problem.  There will always be plenty of skilled otaku artists who can draw h-scenes.  The issue is and always will be writers... because it is the writer that decides whether a VN will become remembered for years to come or be dropped back into the dung at the bottom of the latrine.

First, apologies to those who actually want to read about some of August's releases.  I went on vacation (vacation being a word open to interpretation when it comes to sleeping in unfamiliar beds and helping with my brother's kids), and when I got back, I found I had absolutely no urge whatsoever to pick up a VN.  I guess that taking a true break from VNs for the first time in almost a decade (no VNs for five days straight) was enough to free me from the spell of my obsession.
That said, Jinkou Bato was pretty amusing, so I had every intention of getting back to it, eventually.
This game is based fifty years in the future, fifteen years after a disaster caused by technology (deliberately) gone wrong wiped out the global internet and reduced people to using wires and letters to communicate.  This disaster was caused by artificial lifeforms based on the pigeon that originally served as self-replicating flying antennas.  The maker of these 'artificial pigeons' made them begin to 'eat' radio and electromagnetic waves, literally stopping all signals not passed through a wire.  This resulted in innumerable deaths, and it was such a huge economic and technological blow that the characters of the story are quite aware of how they live in a much-reduced world.
Sora, the protagonist, is an orphan who hates the artificial pigeons more than anyone, as he lost his parents the day of the disaster.  Living with this adopted family, he succeeds in building a set of radios that can communicate with one another without being stopped by the pigeons, and from there the story begins.
Mmm... I'm going to be straight about my feelings on this game.  First, I like the character dynamics.  There is a lot to laugh about early on, and the intensity of Sora and friends when they make a certain discovery is pleasing to me, as I'm a bit tired of characters living without a sense of purpose in my VNs, lol.  That Sora and the others are college students at a vocational university rather than high schoolers is nice as well... and an adult heroine who is bisexual is also nice, hahaha.
That said, both Mizuki's and Akina's paths are weaker than the Tsubaki and Kaguya paths due to the fact that only Tsubaki's and Kaguya's paths actually confront the central issues head on.  Mizuki's and Akina's paths both stink of escapism, and while that is fine on its own... it left me feeling a sense of distaste for the characters involved (yes, I want my characters to be better or stronger people than me). 
Tsubaki and Kaguya's paths are the true path.  No, I'm not saying that they are separately the true path... rather, together they form a single path, in a really weird (if familiar from other otaku media) way.  The path is... extremely emotional, and I honestly felt that Sora, from beginning to end, fulfilled his potential as a character... something that is pretty unusual for VN protagonists in general. 
Lets be clear, this isn't a kamige or even VN of the Year material.  This is a nakige with a great main path and two so-so side paths.  I say 'great', but the game's pace is really fast after the initial, lighter stages of the story.  That said, there is no sense of choppiness to the pacing, and it feels like the events actually occur in the time you see them happen in the game (less than two months), as there are no excess SOL scenes whatsoever.
If you want a relatively quick nakige with some amusement early on, this is a good choice.  I honestly can't recommend it for someone who wants a grand and sweeping opera, though.

Foreword: Game first arouse my interest as alternative version of Subarashiki Hibi. Then I tried to get the glimpse of it by watching hentai OVA... and it was the worst hentai OVA I ever seen, so I was really infuriated since it did not say much about the game. Finally I've picked it up while investigating year 1999 and it struck me as something more serious than a nukige, especially after seeing those demon mind-screw CG. And it's been a while since I enjoyed a visual novel that much.

Title: Tsui no Sora
Developer: KeroQ
Date: 1999-08-27
VNDB link:https://vndb.org/v3246
Youtube walkthrough:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLENAECnNmAq8vJwICEnwWJOz0Yf6ycKz3

Synopsis: Our guy got waked up by his childhood girl for school. Once they got to their classroom, they found out that a girl classmate jumped from their school roof yesterday. Soon, people started talking about end of the world on day 20th. Some even went crazy, lead by one guy. You get to see the events first through our guy's eyes, then his childhood girl's and two more people.
Structure: There are two routes - for Kotomi and Ayana, then there's the route from Kotomi point of view, then the retro-route from Zakuro eyes, then villain route from Takuji viewpoint. And it all finishes with epilogue route for Kotomi and Ayana.
Length: 7 hours 30 minutes.
Game type: Mindscrew end of the world theme ADV.
Difficulty: Easy since there are only 3-4 decisions to make.
Character Design rating: 8/10
Protagonist rating: 8/10
Story rating: 10/10
Game quality: 7/10
Overall rating: 8/10

Rating comments: I did not expect such high scores. Characters aren't voiced, but somehow they manage to feel alive. There are so many protagonists in this game that the rest of characters are easy to understand and remember. If it was only for Yukito, protagonist would get a full 10. Story does not seem anything special on the first glance, but with each route it opens up new depths and raises new questions making it a very integral, memorable and personal experience. I can't rate game quality good for the lack of CG, unvoiced heroes and macromedia director engine.
Protagonist: 
Yukita makes the perfect protagonist for me. He cites Kant, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Bible all the time. He looks like a hooligan, but is absolutely faithful and reliable even though he tries to shrug it off with crude words. He's pretty much the only one who stays calm, trusts in logic and comes to everyone's rescue.
Kotomi is Yukita's childhood friend. She is quite nice as a heroine, but when she becomes protagonist we get to see her constant hesitations and anxieties. It's a pain to see her crying "I don't know anything anymore", thinking "I must be alone and get stronger" and running away from Yukita at school.
Zakuro is the classmate of Yukita and Kotomi. At the beginning of the game she's already dead having jumped from the roof. But her story was the most impressive one for me. But more of it in the story part.
Takuji is the villain of the game. A shy small boy who at the same time wants to peel everyone naked and sentence to death. He's really cool as protagonist for having all kinds of hallucinations that make the game a mind-screw.
Characters: Who do we have left? There's classmate Otonashi Ayana who has her own route, but is not a protagonist for she's the most mysterious character in the game and her manner of thinking should not be revealed. There's also classmate Yokoyama Yasuko who enters the same kendo club as Kotomi, but at the same time really sympathizes Takuji end of the world ideas. Yasuko brother is the biggest supporter of Takuji as well. There's also guy Ozawa that bullied Zakuro, but at the beginning of the game he's dead. There's a magical girl Riruro, but her existence is under a huge question, hehe. We also have medical department teacher.

Story: I can't really tell about the story without some spoilers (although I'll try to hide heavy spoilers under a banner), so be aware. 
I. Game starts from Yukito perspective 7 days before the disaster and he can opt for either Kotomi or Ayana as the main heroine. The choice only determines couple short scenes of each heroine and determines whether Kotomi H event opens up or not. The contents remains the same. First two days are spent in mass neurosis as classmates keep jumping from the roof and rumors about the end of the world keep spreading. Then there are two days of open conflict of Takuji with the school that result in dangerous cult creation. Next two days are notable for Kotomi kidnapping by the Takuji group and her rescue by Yukito. The final day is not clearly shown.
II. Then starts the route of Kotomi which is exactly the same route, but from the eyes of Kotomi. She's there mostly to add girlish thoughts to the narration and of course to show her two days of captivity and torments (read: H events) while kidnapped. So it's kind of non-important fan-service route.
III. Well, when you think that the game is over, the next route opens up. And instead a week before the disaster we go to two weeks before the disaster to the body of Zakuro. She got raped and made photos of by bully Ozawa one day and from that time was blackmailed into intimate relations daily. But once she gets a letter saying "Rejoice, your torments will end tomorrow". Since it's the most impressive route for me I'd only tackle it under the spoiler banner.
IV. The seven days before the disaster are shown yet again, but from the eyes of main villain Takuji. We get to see how his ideas are formed, what pushes him, how he recruits allies and eventually names himself the savior of humankind. From that point it's hard to determine delusions from truth as he sees monsters, magical girl Riruru, her spirit father and gets instructions from them, but most of the time he seems to just be talking with the graffiti wall. He starts as savior of humanity, but through demonic teachings soon recognizes the need to purify humans before the final skies by killing them. The longest and weirdest route, but at the same time it still feels light.
V. Epilogues sheds light on events after the day X and give more questions than answers.
HEAVY PLOT SPOILERS INSIDE
CG: Too few! But characters standing sprites usually look so good that the lack of CG is not that grave.
Sound: BGM includes few, but atmospheric short cycled compositions and there is no voicing at all.

Humor: Apart of this funny moment of skirt flipping there was one real joke. Yukito and Ayano stay at the roof. Ayano asks "- What book do you hold in hands?" "- Kant" " Why would you need a book about girl's genitalia?" "Wrong! It's not about that!" "So it's called just CAN'T? Why would you need a book about impotence?" Then he tries to tell her Kant and Wittgenstein theories. "Wittgenstein? Is that the male apparatus?". I don't remember any more moments, but for me it's important to have at least one funny memorable moment. 

Themes: There are a lot of themes. 
1) Is the end of the world possible? Yakuto tries to find an answer in Kant, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Bible books. He uses Kant's antimony to make a conclusion that the beginning of the universe is not provable and thus there can't be the end of the world. 
2) The war between light and darkness forces to impede/fasten the end of the world - is it real or imagination of fanatics? One certain route is devoted just to this theme.
3) Who actually saved the world? Was it Zakuro, Ayana or maybe even Takuji? All three came to contact to the higher essences and could influence that. Of maybe the world never needed to be saved and those are just superstition and ignorance? We have to figure it for ourselves.
4) The separate question is who is Ayana? Her every word is mysterious. She does not have parents, but she's always present at the most gruesome events late at night at the school.
5) What this game is even about? Again, you decide, the first two collages of screenshots allow to treat the game as spiritual mind-screw, youth criminal drama or eschatological religious confrontation of heroes and devils.
Overall comments: I have not read Subarashiki Hibi and can only judge it by reviews and vndb. But what I see there is that the core of the plot and the characters are absolutely the same. SubaHibi was enlarged immensely to fit the modern demand, but such detail would not be possible without this little weird gem from the 1990s.

I've been considering this for some time, but it has suddenly become a reality.
To be blunt, I've come to my limit when it comes to playing pure SOL games.  Oh, I can still enjoy many of them, but if you asked me whether I can look at them without my resentment of 'normal' SOL content blinding me, the answer is no.  If I have to read through one more template date scene or see another osananajimi climb through the window from next door, I'm going to start tearing out the last remaining hairs atop my head.
*coughs* Ahem, now that I've got that out, it needs to be said that I've been doing this since September of 2012... a ridiculous amount of time to be playing roughly 80% of all non-nukige VNs that come out (I'm figuring those I dropped or just couldn't play because they were just that bad into the twenty percent). 
Just to be clear, I will still continue to play VNs and comment on/review them in this blog.  However, I will no longer play as many outside my tastes, nor will I go out of my way to seek gems from companies I hate reading from. 
I realized while I was playing Koisaku (Ensemble's latest game), that a few years ago, I would have read this game without any real problems, and I wouldn't even have blinked at the crap that now drives me up the wall.  Oh sure, Ensemble's base quality has fallen massively, but when I took a step back, this is actually one of the better amongst their more recent games, with plenty of indications of real stories for the heroines in the background.  However, I found I just couldn't tolerate it.
It hit me in the date scene that occurs in the common route... I have no tolerance for date scenes at all anymore.  Scenes like that exist for every heroine in every SOL VN, and they all turn out in almost an identical fashion.  Reading it, even though it was basically a 'friend date', was like dragging my brain through mud.  I just couldn't do it.
I promised myself that I wouldn't BS myself on this particular matter years ago... and I knew the limit was coming.  I just didn't realize that it would be this soon.
So, I have to announce that this is the end of my VN of the Month column.  Now, all that remains is my Random VNs and whatever VNs I choose to play each month.
I will continue to play what I'm interested in, and that will probably include slice-of-life at times.  However, I will no longer play SOL out of a sense of duty to my readers. 
My original reasons for starting VN of the Month
When I first started Clephas' VN of the Month, it was because vndb gives nothing to you for info on their games beyond poor tls of the game summary from Getchu, character profiles, and sometimes tags (that might or might not be accurate).  I felt that that didn't do most games justice, and I hated the way I had to go into a game blind on so many occasions.  As such, I started putting up commentaries on just what kind of VN I was playing, with few or no spoilers.  This was a need that, at the time, was not being fulfilled (and as far as I know, still isn't, since most reviewers include major spoilers because they are inconsiderate). 
Over time, my routine each month started with figuring out which games weren't nukige and which I would play first...  and picking out which one was the best after I played them (the latter of course being entirely a matter of my opinion, informed as it might be). 
However, it is time to set down my burden.  I tried handing off my work to others, and that worked for a while (thanks to @Dergonu@fun2novel@BookwormOtaku@Kiriririri for their help over the last year - yes, even you, Kiriririri).  In the end, though, I'm just one man... and one middle-aged man with increasingly bad health isn't going to be able to keep this up any longer.  Heck, I'm amazed i kept going this long.
I do hope someone else takes up the torch of at least informing people of what to expect in newer games (and not just the ones from popular companies), but that isn't my job anymore. 
Thanks for reading,
Clephas
 

Now that I have confirmation from Dergonu that the game he was playing is not VN of the Month quality (he has stalled on it), I will move on to finally announcing VN of the Month for March and April.
March
March was a decent month, since it had three potential candidates for VN of the Month.  Those candidates are:
Butterfly Seeker
AI Love
Unjou no Fairy Tale
Now, despite my rating of it, I'm going to go ahead and disqualify AI Love.  Why?  Because it is essentially a borderline nukige.  It made its way onto my Chicken Soup for the Soul list, but, as I've stated in the past, that isn't necessarily an indication of kamige status.  Rather, it is an indication of how good the game is at soothing and relieving non-violent stress.
So, this comes down to Unjou no Fairy Tale versus Butterfly Seeker.  Based purely on my personal tastes, I'd probably go for Unjou no Fairy Tale, since I'm an admitted fantasy addict... but in the end, I had to (reluctantly) admit that Butterfly Seeker was the better VN.  The depth of the story, the characters, and even just the details of the important events was such that I couldn't honestly give Unjou no Fairy Tale the victory for VN of the Month, March 2018.
My reasons for excluding Etatoto from the final running are... that fun2novel's own review and private comments didn't leave me with the impression of VN of the Month quality.  Worth reading for a certain portion of the community?  Yes.  Worthy of being recommended on a larger scale... no.
April
Having dropped Taiju for the moment (SofthouseChara's newest SLG), I was left with only one viable candidate for April... Yuusha to Maou, to Majo no Cafe.  This is perhaps the weakest VN of the Month candidate I've put up in quite some time, but it still easily won over Kari Gurashi Ren'ai, which is the only other game that hit my baseline standard.  Naming it as VN of the Month, April 2018 actually troubles me a bit... given a choice, I wish that Unjou or AI Love had been released in April so I'd have a better candidate.  I almost decided not to name one for this month, but I reluctantly decided that it meets standards. 

First, I'll say that this game is pretty much based on the concept of using the concept of templates and archetypes in the story.  The protagonist bumps into a girl with toast in her mouth, gets woken up by an osananajimi, catches a maid falling from the sky, is frequently scolded by a fake-prude iinchou, and he even has an ojousama fall in love with him at first sight.
Now, the attempt to turn all the classic template happenings of a moege/charage into a joke sort of falls flat in this game.  The common route is pure dirt in that sense (the lack of any original content plus a failure to fully play up to the game's theme ruins things).  I will straight out tell you that the common route is boring.  I've encountered similar happenings in literally hundreds of games in the past, and I never really felt a bond with most of the characters in the common route.  As a result, I only went off on one heroine route (and don't plan to bother with the others).
This route was Miori's... and Miori's route is the only reason I didn't just drop this game and give it a 4 on vndb (points for visuals and audio, negatives for storytelling, average characters).  To be blunt, Miori is of a template I didn't realize I had missed in recent days... the eccentric fushigi-chan.  In recent years, this kind of character has mostly fallen to the wayside (probably because Key got such joy out of overusing it), so having this particular template make a comeback was a definite positive for me (as opposed to the older osananajimi oneesan, the osananajimi imouto, and the secret pervert iinchou, which have been constants in charage since forever). 
If there is one thing Circus does well, it is moe.  Miori's moe point is the traditional gap between her nearly emotionless everyday and her dere.  This is shown briefly when she deals with a cat in the common route (incidentally the point at which I decided to pick her), but only really comes into play in her heroine route.  Her route is traditional down to the last detail (deep love after confession>frequent ichaicha>gets found out by father>confront father>betrothal) for her second character type (not going to reveal this, though it is fairly obvious after you see her and Matsuri in the same scene).  However, since I was just sitting back and enjoying fushigi-chan deredere action, I was perfectly happy to ignore the archetypical ending.
Overall, my advice to anyone looking at this game is... if there is a heroine type in there that you like, go ahead and just play that heroine's route.  The common route is pure crap, but the heroine routes will likely push a lot of positive buttons for those in love with their particular type of heroine, as they did with me.  I did make an attempt at starting the other heroine paths... but I just got bored at the endless stream of predictable occurrences.   For a veteran of charage/moege, this game can be a painful slog or a joy, depending on where you are in it.
Edit: It needs to be said, but the main reason I give this game a failing grade on the common route is because they went for a spoof theme but didn't make the common route wacky enough.  When it came down to it, except for the protagonist's complaints, it was just a weaker version of a normal moege common route.

This is Unobara Nozomu's second attempt at the mystery genre (for those who are interested, he also wrote Yurirei, Teito Hiten Daisakusen, and Fairytale Requiem) after the dramatic failure of Shinsou Noise last year. 
To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to this game, despite its interesting concept.  This game, like many detective mystery type VNs, possesses a deduction system... but thankfully, it also lets you skip that portion at the click of a button (thus avoiding the story disruption that is the norm for games with deduction gameplay). 
The story takes place in Shiraori City, a small city that has a massive murder rate, with most of them being carried out by serial killers, who seem to bloom like poisonous flowers by the handful in the city (incidentally, the manslaughter and incidental killing rates are much lower compared to the population than in the rest of the country, apparently).  In this city, due to the sheer workload of all those murder cases, is a system whereby young people with unusual talents are taken on and trained as student investigators.
The protagonist, Tohno Keisuke is one of these, a young man with the ability to see the factor that made a victim's fate certain when he touches their corpse (or their ashes, hair, etc.).  This ability has, with the help of his fellow investigators, allowed him to find several serial killers.  His school's 'team' of student investigators works under the label of 'mushikui' (a club supposedly devoted to finding better ways to eat bugs).
The members of the club are Tendou Yui, a girl with an extremely strong sense of empathy that allows her to read the emotions and thought patterns of others from the most minor clues; Himuro Chitose, an almost autistic girl with an excellent memory and capacity for rational thought that has her training to be a profiler; Saotome Haya, an aggressive girl with immense physical abilities who hates criminals and loves nothing more than beating the shit out of them; and Kiryuu Azusa, the club's overseer, a teacher who is also a trained detective. 
The game consists of three heroine paths and one true path.  There are eight endings other than the true one (five of which are bad or dead endings). 
The heroine paths in this game are about of equal quality, each adding pieces to the greater puzzle of the strange city the characters live in and bringing each heroine to life in turn.  The protagonist, Keisuke, is something of a fractured spirit, constantly stabbed with pain left from his past (I'm not going to spoil you about it, even though it is revealed relatively early in the common route why this is), and how the heroines bring him out of this differs radically from path to path. 
... trying to avoid spoilers in a mystery game is a serious pain in the butt.  I can't really say anything in particular about the heroine paths without spoiling things, so I'll restrict myself to saying that each heroine path covers an individual case (a series of serial killings), and the mysteries themselves are relatively interesting on their own.  Chitose's perp is probably the most obvious, whereas Haya's perp is the most obscure (clues are more subtle).  There is a lot of psychopathy and disturbed minds in this game, and that includes the heroines and the protagonist (they all have issues, though  not as bad as the killers they chase, lol). 
The true path follows the mystery of the 'why' and 'what' of what happened six years ago (the events that resulted in Keisuke gaining the Butterfly Seeker ability and becoming obsessed with saving as many lives as possible).  It reveals, piece by piece (drawing on the 'pieces' revealed in each heroine's path in part) the full truth of both the events six years previous and the events still occurring in Shiraori City.   The ending of the true path is a bittersweet one, and - unlike most such paths - it isn't a heroine ending.  While there are some things to be optimistic about for the characters, the fact remains that theirs is a life surrounded by tragedy (oh and watching Yui during a certain scene was scarier than any of the serial killers in this VN, lol). 
I left this VN feeling relatively good about it... which is rare for me, when it comes to mystery VNs.  A lot of it was that I liked the characters, the music, and how they handled the actual cases.  Another part of it was that Keisuke was a surprisingly good protagonist.  Overall, this was a good VN, though I'm not likely to pick it for VN of the Month this time around (this month is waaay too packed). 
For those who are interested, Dergonu is handling Akumade, Kore wa ~ no Monogatari and fun2novel is handling Etatoto.  The simple reason is that there are just too many March releases for one man to handle, and they were interested in those two games.
Edit: In retrospect, I do have one big complaint about this VN... there is no Azusa path.  Azusa would make an excellent heroine, and it seemed a bit forced to make all the heroines around the protagonist's own age, considering how mature he is, in general. 

Yurikago is one of my favorite VNs.  That isn't because it so 'awesome' or a kamige.  Story-wise, it is actually a bit below the average for Akatsuki Works.  No, the reason I like this game so much is the characters and their interactions.
Kiritooshi Hiro, the protagonist (his surname means 'to cut all the way through' lol) is a young high school student who lives every day trapped in a web of his own apathy.  Tormented by his 'Knight Frame' (a magitech-type device that replaces his entire skeletal system) and a sense of his own guilt for having murdered his father in order to gain it (this is not a spoiler, it mentions this within the first fifty lines, lol), he feels isolated from the world around him, and he can only really consider those who are - like him - outside the norm to be people (this is a psychological disease created by the implantation of the Knight Frame into a psychologically immature subject).  He regularly attends a the Kurohagi Dojo, where he fights with Kangasa Ume, who has inherited an 'unbreakable body' (literally unbreakable... if she falls from the stratosphere, she is unharmed, but she is not invulnerable to disease or techniques that overwrite her original state).  He generally spends a great deal of time trying to defend himself (unsuccessfully) from the females of the story, who seem to vary from seeing him as a favorite chew toy to being eternally exasperated by him.  He has a bad habit of saying what he is thinking at any given moment in his rare interpersonal reactions, then wanting to bash his head into the nearest wall in embarrassment after reflecting on what he said.  When his few truly 'sensitive' spots are touched, he can instantly become a psychopathic, remorseless killer, but those points are relatively few and far between.
Kangasa Ume is the last survivor of the Kangasa Family, who all possessed an unbreakable body.   Her body imposes on her a unique and distasteful way of viewing the world, where her reactions to everything around her are determined on whether they are fragile or difficult to break.  She also despises that part of herself intensely, even to th point of being nearly suicidal at times.  With those few she allows herself to become close to, beating on them becomes a form of interpersonal communication (she regularly breaks Hiro's bones when embarrassed or irritated).   She is a student of the Kurohagi style, which focuses on the forceful creation of 'tenketsu' (breaking points) or the use of existing ones to destroy the bodies of their opponents.  She is fairly advanced in this, and as a kindergartner she once launched herself into the stratosphere when she tried to kill the planet that way.
Tae is the main heroine of the story and an angel.  Angels in this story are summoned into the body of a corpse from a higher realm and are bound to the one who loved the original owner of that body.  By instinct, they love their summoner/controller, and will do anything for his sake, up to and including self-harm or mass murder.  Since her kind were originally created as a slave race, she has an M streak a mile wide when it comes to Hiro, and she wants nothing more than for him to treat her like garbage and beat the shit out of her... and is unsatisfied that he doesn't do so. 
Aria is the last of the three heroines, a young angel who possesses wings made up of iron stakes and whose special ability allows her to overwrite the reality of anything she touches to have already been punctured by one of her stakes.  She is very honest and straightforward, a total innocent when it comes to everyday reactions and concepts, and (in her route) she is constantly asking questions, because she is also too intellectually lazy to think things out on her own.  She is also a drug addict, due to an existing command from her master that she use a certain drug to eliminate her emotions when they go beyond a certain peak level.
Kurohagi Zenjirou is Ume's adoptive father/grandfather and the master of the Kurohagi Dojo.  At one point, he was involved in the religious wars that resulted in the creation of the mystic technology behind the Kishi Kokkaku and angels like Tae, but he is now very much retired.  Despite his easygoing attitude, he regularly breaks his best students' bones and will even maim them if he thinks that is what is needed to train them.  He loves Ume deeply, but he believes in standing back and letting the younger generation find its own way.  He isn't really human anymore (psychologically or physically), and after two hundred years of life, even he admits he doesn't really understand people viscerally anymore. 
Tsugumu is an ancient angel (the  most powerful one) who performed the surgery to transfer Hiro's father's Knight Frame to him after Hiro killed him.  She loves anything interesting, and she sees her abandonment by her master as a very long-term sexual play.  She, like all the other women around Hiro, regularly beats the shit out of him for minor infractions (either through teasing or literal blows), but she seems to always be looking on the people around her from the outside.  She is very lazy and generally careless (she forgot to 'zip Hiro up' when she implanted the Knight Frame, which was a small part of the cause of his mental disorders, lol). 
Redear is the heroine of Tomoe's side-scenario, a psychopathic loli angel who skins people alive and removes their limbs and organs for fun.  She makes little sense when she talks, frequently referring to various fairy tales and old children's books, such as Allice in Wonderland.  It is impossible to tell what will make her happy at any given moment, but it is generally guaranteed to include killing someone or doing something similar.
Tomoe is a young man who acts entirely on impulse, living as he desires at any given moment.  When he sees bullying, he beats the shit out of the bullies, then he beats the shit out of the bullied one.  When someone mistakes him for a woman, he breaks their ribs and jaw, then leaves them for dead.... and when he meets Hiro, he always tries to cause a confrontation with him. 
Now, needless to say, the characters of this game are... unusual.  I loved their antics, and the game is pretty violent (think pulverized flesh, followed by repeated regeneration, followed by more pulverization).  The Grand Route is an excellent follow-up to the other routes, and I always leave this game feeling satisfied.
Edit:
For those who are interested in playing the game, there is a suggested (by me) playing order.  Generally speaking, you want to do Tae's route right before the Grand Route (because Tae's route is way too revealing).  This is immovable.  If you just want to see the true ending, do Tae's route and the Grand Route only, though you'll miss out on some awesome moments.  My suggested order is: Aria>Ume or Ritia/Tomoe>Tae>Grand Route.  Really, it would probably be best to do Ritia/Tomoe right before Tae's route, but if you want a bit of freedom of choice, that is a good place to put it.  I suggest Aria's route because it is the only route where most of the other characters are almost irrelevant and Aria is actually something other than a speechless killing machine.  It is also fairly revealing about how extreme the nature of the angels is, lol.
My favorite heroine in this game is Ume.  For all that she is the true heroine, Tae (or at least, the Tae in Tae's route) is mostly a do-M pervert who will do anything to get Hiro to smash her face in or treat her like dirt.  While she is pretty adorable in her route, Ume's internal conflict is a lot more interesting. 
The main reason that I say play Tae's route, even if you play none of the other heroine routes, is because Tae's route reveals several key elements about Hiro that are absolutely necessary for you to know in order to enjoy the Grand Route (really, it would be better if you knew stuff about Aria too, but meh).
The characters in this game, whether villain or protagonist side (note: everyone in this game is crazy on one level or another... hell, the most sane person there is Tae, and that is just... sad) are generally great... but moege lovers will probably run away from most of them screaming (Redear/Ritia is every lolicon's nightmare).  Ume is an extreme self-hating sadist, Tae is about as M as anyone can get (so much so that she can get off just on being ignored), and Aria is a drug addict... lol
Story-wise, the game is actually pretty good, but you should know that the writer chose to make Hiro an unreliable narrator and goes out of his way never to just come out and say things directly.  I love the setting in this game, and it was obviously designed to contain more than one story.  Unfortunately, Akatsuki Works Black produced three great games in a very short time and then got absorbed by Akabeisoft3, so we'll probably never see any more games in this particular universe... or in the Izuna Zanshinken universe (which, considering that the secret ending is open-ended, is sad).

Understand, chuunige mostly appeal to a very core fanbase.  The style, the fact that they don't translate well, and the fact that most of the action/story is so 'out there' makes the games unapproachable.  The sheer amount of text means that localization costs are through the roof, which makes things worse, of course. 
I'm being realistic, ignoring my inner fanboy who screams everybody should love chuunige because charage suck in comparison.  However, that is the flat-out truth. 
So, I decided to make a list of chuunige I believe would sell in the west/appeal more to the western brain... and not just the core fanbase.  I have these ordered by the most likely to the least.
1.  Bullet Butlers- I say Bullet Butlers is the most accessible precisely because it uses a lot of elements that Western audiences can easily grasp without having to be 'deep' into otaku media.  Zombies, elves, dragons, and orcs.  Firearms as the most common weapon type, superviolence, and a film noir atmosphere to a great deal of the game.  If I were to name one chuunige that has the potential to be a hit (by VN standards), if properly advertised, it is this one.
2.  Draculius- If I were to name a sort-of chuunige that is accessible to people that don't particularly like chuunige, this would be it.  If you liked the best parts of Libra and hated the rest, you'll probably like this game.  It has aged somewhat, but the characters are unique, the story is excellent, and the humor is recognizable on both sides of the ocean. 
3.  Hello, Lady- Yes, I went there.  If you can enjoy Narita Shinri, you will like this game, regardless of your genre preference.  Narita Shinri is a protagonist who will earn as many haters as he does lovers, and there won't be that much room in between.  However, his story is very much one that is visceral and easily comprehensible for any human who has lost someone they loved.
4.  Shinigami no Testament- 3rdEye's chuunige are accessible.  I could put any chuunige by that company in this spot other than Bloody Rondo and say that it has the same potential for success.  Even Bloody Rondo does have some appeal outside its genre (in fact, it probably has more, lol).  3rdEye is a company that I can use to brainwash newbies without overwhelming them, which is why I was happy when Sorcery Jokers got localized, lol.
5.  Gekkou no Carnevale- I can guarantee someone is going to ask why I didn't mention any other Nitroplus game besides this one.  However, the themes in this game are very Western, for the most part... and werewolves and murder are always guaranteed to catch the interest of a certain (surprisingly large) crowd over here.  Put in living dolls and mafia connections as well, and you have a recipe for success. 
I actually thought of naming some others, but when I seriously thought about it, the hurdles for a Westerner and non-chuunige addict for playing those were just too high.   Anything Bakumatsu is going to be translated poorly, so Last Cavalier is out.  Evolimit has potential, but I thought BB is more likely to catch hold of westerners who aren't already part of the scene.  Anything like Dies Irae is almost guaranteed to flop if it isn't 100% crowd-funded (as in, all costs paid for by the crowd-funding), so Bradyon Veda and the Silverio series are out.  Vermilion has similar problems.  Muramasa suffers from swordsmanship infodumping that will probably cause the average reader's brain to go numb early on.  Tokyo Necro has zombies, but the chances of people actually getting past the prologue are relatively low, despite the coolness of the story and setting.  Izuna Zanshinken has enormous potential in the US, because of the style and the themes it tackles, but its episodic 'feeling' is a huge negative for some of us... 

Before I go back to my work, which is going to take the rest of the day to finish, I thought I'd leave yall with a commentary on one of my favorite jrpgs, Growlanser 3.
Growlanser 3, released in the US as part of a collection with Growlanser 2, was the final localization done by Working Designs, the company that pioneered independent localization of jrpgs in the US (up until then, most had been localized by Japanese companies or the console first-party company).  It is the prequel to 1 and 2 (a battle about midway through 3 results in the world you see in 1 and 2 and remains as a legend to the people there), and often competes with IV for being considered the best game in the series.
In Growlanser 3, the sun is dying, famine is rampant, rain falls eternally at some places and hardly at all in others.  Plague has destroyed entire nations, and those that remain are fighting ferociously for the few places where the land is still fertile.  Assassination, genocide, and cold realpolitik have hardened the hearts of leaders, and the people that remain are growing increasingly desperate, further fueling the flames of war.
Into this comes Slayn, a young man with no memories and a talent for Darkness magic, accompanied by a Dark Fairy (fairies in the Growlanser universe are usually sentient concentrations of elemental spirits in a tiny female form), enters the scene about this time.  As she tries to discover the truth about himself, he gets caught up in the war and ends up seeking the causes behind the slow death of his world.
Growlanser's signature battle system is a combination of RTS and ATB systems, where your characters each have a speed that determines how fast their turn comes up.  Motion across the battlefield is in real time (based on that character's stats), and in order to engage an enemy, you have to bring them within range.
Magic in this game starts out as simple elemental spells, which increase in power as you chant them longer (based on the character's ability, you will be limited in how high the level you can reach with that character at any given time) and are one of only a few ways in which you can ignore range issues.  The reason this is important is that, in order to get the true ending (where certain characters survive where they would normally die), you must get a 'mission complete' on every single story battle.  Since doing so often requires preventing the massacre of running civilians or preventing the escape of a particular enemy, range becomes a serious issue from the beginning, so strategically utilizing magic and having some idea of how long it will take your characters to reach an enemy and move after they attack is important. 
Choices in this game have a huge potential variance, depending on how you've shaped Slayn's personality (through early on choices and a certain event which lets you shape his base personality and capabilities).  If he is cold and rational, you will find yourself unable to make enraged conversational choices, and if he is hot-blooded, you will find it impossible to make Slayn take the high road in some situations. 
Story-wise, this game manages to touch human emotion in a way I think newcomers to jrpgs will be surprised at.  Growlanser 3's world is dying, and most of the world is already dead.  As a result, you find yourself walking through the aftermath of plagues, witnessing massacres, and overall confronting both the best and worst of human nature when put into an extreme situation.  For a jrpg, this kind of display of human weakness is fairly unusual, since most tend to strike an optimistic note in that sense, but this is actually typical on some levels for the series.  In Growlanser 2, it is quite possible to side with the villains (given that you've fulfilled the proper conditions), and Growlanser IV's world isn't exactly kind to its people, even aside from the bigger issues. 
The visuals in this game were done by Urushihara Satoshi, who also handled such anime as Bubblegum Crisis, Queen's Blade, and Plastic Little.  As such, they are aesthetically pleasing, even now that the basic style has changed radically (this guy has a great aesthetic sense... though he is a bit overly ero-ero, from what I remember of Legend of Lemnear). 
Overall, if you want to start looking back into the past of jrpgs, this is a good game to start with (though at this point, you'll probably be forced to use an emulator).

Unjou no Fairy Tale is the second game by Cosmic Cute in the series/setting that began with Sora no Tsukurikata.  It is based around eighteen to twenty years after the original game in the city of Kaguya, a lawless city with many different races floating in the sky far above.  It is ruled by the invincible Mayor (with thirty-seven terms under her belt) Azumaza, frequently troubled the antics of the great (and in the eyes of ground dwellers, insane) alchemist Nemo, and plagued with more criminal organizations than anyone can count.
In that place, there is a neutral ground, the cafe Amelia, run by the protagonist Tsukasa, with the wannabe Great Witch Natsu as a waitress, frequented by the diva Dahlia, and visited regularly by the elven swordmistress and antique/art seller Makoto.  One day, a girl in a beautiful dress comes running down the street chased by thugs and is rescued by Makoto and Natsu... only to find out that she is not only a princess but that she is Tsukasa's younger sister.
Thus begins the story of the city of Kaguya and the Pay Back thieving gang.
Now, before I go any further, it needs to be said that, like Sora no Tsukurikata, this game uses the 'ladder-style' story structure, meaning that heroine paths other than the true one split off at the end of arcs featuring primarily the heroine in question.  This story structure does not do the heroines other than the true one justice.  In most cases (such as G-senjou or Eustia), it becomes an excuse for neglecting the heroines or making internally inconsistent heroine routes.  For that reason, I consider the very existence of this story structure in any VN to be a reason to automatically subtract 1.5 points off the maximum rating I give it on vndb.  In other words... the story just has to be awesome for me to consider overturning my dislike of this structure.
The common route of this game does an excellent job of introducing the characters and giving you a good idea of the internal dynamics of the city of Kaguya.  Kaguya... is the kind of city no sane person would want to live in.  The protagonist routinely sleeps through gunshots and explosions (they are so used to it that it doesn't even disturb their slumber), and the Mayor (who is over 2500 years old) seems to take great pleasure in both keeping the chaos from settling and keeping it from overflowing beyond all forms of control.  I spent most of the common route smiling or laughing, similar to Soratsuku, which is a definite good thing.
Now, I'll introduce the heroines...
The first heroine is Dahlia... and she is already my favorite.  She is a singer at a high-class nightclub, a fox-girl with the ability to control others with her singing.  In the thieving group she serves as the driver and occasionally uses her voice to control pursuers or guards.  She is the second oldest of the heroines, in her mid-twenties, and she has an inordinate fondness for heavy drink and teasing those she likes. 
The second heroine is Makoto, known as the greatest swordswoman in Kaguya, as well as being Tsukasa's first friend in the city.  She is the oldest of the heroines, being an elf (there are hints that she is at least fifty years old early on), and she works most of the time as a dealer in antiques and art.  She has a reserved personality, and she is often misunderstood, due to her tendency to talk to her sword (yes, she talks to her sword).  However, she is also cute... in that she does things like making lists of things she wants to do with her friends and rehearsing potential conversational scenarios well in advance of even the most normal, everyday events. 
The third heroine is the protagonist's younger sister, Yuki.  Yuki is...  a strong-willed, pure-hearted princess who came to Kaguya to find her long-lost oniisama... only to find that he had become a thief and manager of a cafe in one of the most crime-ridden cities in existence.  While she is generally forgiving by nature, once you manage to anger her... she is easily the scariest of the four heroines.
Natsu is a wannabe witch
I honestly hate the fact that she is the main heroine, because that is two games in a row that go to unreasonably naive, kind-hearted witches who frequently mess up on a grand scale.  This is a mistake frequently made with ladder-style structure games, but it is usually the case that the weakest heroine in the group ends up as the main/true heroine for games using this structure.  She, like Hal/Haru in the previous game, is a sugar-addict with a rather unpredictable magical ability.  There isn't a drop of malice in her personality, but...
Dahlia path
Dahlia, as I said above, is my favorite heroine in this game, so I was more than a little angry to see that yet another great mimikko heroine was being condemned to 'lowest-ranked heroine Hell'.  However, as I played the path, I stopped caring about that BS.  Dahlia and Tsukasa's romance creates one of those rare situations where I actually have to take a step back and wipe the tears away... solely because of the romance.  Since I'm not a fan of romance for its own sake, that pretty much says it all about that.  This path has some excellent feels and is about as long as the mimikko from Soratsuku's path.  I spent a great deal of the last part of the path just laughing hysterically at the antics of the characters as they strove for Dahlia and Tsukasa's sakes, and I wept at the climax.  Definitely worth reading, though this definitely has my mimikko-love bias interfering with my judgment.  The ending after story is very heart-warming, and it takes you to a point three years after the end, which was nice.
Makoto path
One thing that absolutely needs to be said about Makoto's and Dahlia's paths, but is a major SPOILER:
I'm going to be blunt... this path is simply weaker than Dahlia's.  Part of this is because Makoto's personality is so reserved and the romance is so charage-ish.  Another part is that there really isn't that much in the way of deep feels or good action/comedy in this path, outside of the usual with Yuki losing her temper.  While I like the ending, I have to say that I felt a bit cheated, because they didn't go into detail on the past that lies between Tsukasa and Makoto, despite them being one another's oldest friends.
Yuki Path
The Yuki path feels a lot like a true path.   The simple reason is that, despite its seemingly innocent (and hilarious) beginnings, in the end it pretty much reveals everything there is to know about Kaguya and Azumaza's past, as well as the reasons why Tsukasa ended up in Kaguya.  Honestly, as I finish this path, I think that it is possible that it was the true path, rather than Natsu's, and that is my hope as I go into Natsu's path (I'm writing down my opinions on the paths as I finish them).  The ending is really touching, and I had to cry at some of the revelations that get put in here...  Incidentally, by the time her path comes around, Yuki has been thoroughly poisoned by Kaguya's anarchist atmosphere, and this has some rather hilarious results in the fourth arc that leads to the final path split.
Natsu path
Aaah... I don't mean to be cruel... but they got seriously lazy in Natsu's path.  I mean, it feels very much like an echo/rehash of something I've seen a dozen times before (you'll see what I mean if you play it, but I won't spoil it).  Understand, Hal is my least favorite heroine from Soratsuku and Natsu is my least favorite heroine from this game (The order goes Dahlia>Yuki>Makoto>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Natsu).  Like her mother, she is a clumsy doofus with a ridiculous amount of poorly-utilized magical talent.  Every single element of her path past the end of the last common route arc (Arc 5) is ridiculously predictable and holds no surprises, down to the last detail.  I haven't been this irritated at a 'true' path in years.  If I were to just judge this game on the three previous paths, I would give it an 8.5 on vndb, but, due to this path, I have to give it an 8.  Sadly, this is one of those cases where the main heroine and the final path are a hindrance, rather than closing out the story on a good note.
Edit: This is just a minor addendum of some thoughts I had in retrospect or forgot to include in the main text. 
I honestly like characters like Yuki, who, while functionally innocent of the details of normal life, nonetheless possess an iron will.  I also love it how everyone is afraid of her despite the fact that she is the weakest character combat-wise.  In addition, the way hardened criminals are obviously terrified of her makes it even better.
Dahlia is very similar - in background, personality, and (to some degree) relationship to the protagonist - to Yurika Vistvolg from Soratsuku.  As such, even if I hadn't guessed that she was not the main by the walkthrough, I would have figured it out anyway.  This writer has a definite preference for characters with an element of 'innocence' as  main heroines (note that a total of two of the heroines in both the games he has written are not innocents on some level), despite the dystopian settings he creates. 
If we were to eliminate my personal tastes completely from the equation, Makoto is probably the weakest heroine, in terms of character development.  For some reason, almost all the elements of her character that could have been used to make her route more dramatic (her sentient sword, her longer lifespan, etc) never once became an issue in the game.  This is a huge red mark in my personal book regarding this writer, as I absolutely loathe failures to utilize fundamental aspects of a character's design.
It has to be said that this game relied a lot more heavily on the immortal characters for humor than Soratsuku.  Asumaza, Nemo, and Simone are so far 'out there' as characters that their actions can be considered an unavoidable natural disaster, so they make wonderful pillars for the game's situational comedy (similar to the vampire lord in Soratsuku and her love of junk food and torturing people who use guns).  However, it also needs to be said that Simone, at the very least, should have been a heroine.  That type tends to have a great dere if handled properly.  It is pure negligence on the writer's part that she isn't a heroine (though she has an h-scene in the append disc). 

(Note: Right now I'm playing Dungeon of Regalias, on a long-standing request for me to make an assessment.  This doesn't have anything to do with my statements below.)
One of my pet peeves is companies that depend on their reputation to sell their games, regardless of quality.  Pulltop, Navel, and Circus are the most frequent offenders on this side...  Pulltop, in particular, has developed a habit of releasing second-rate games under existing IPs (the second and third Lovekami and their sex-focused FDs) that add nothing to the series.  Navel has a habit of excessive sequels (Tsuki ni Yorisou Otome no Sahou and Shuffle) and trips off into side-story wonderland.  Circus has a habit of endless sequels (D.C.).
I call this 'resting on your laurels' because these companies are basically milking successful IPs to death in order to stay afloat, rather than generating really new content.  Oh, I will be the first to admit that Shuffle really, really did need the rewrites it got later on, and the afterstories and voice patch for the original Tsuki ni Yorisou were hugely beneficial.  However, Tsuki ni Yorisou, Otome no Sahou 2, despite the hopes of those of us who were interested to see how they would handle a second generation, turned out to be greatly substandard to the original, flopping massively in the heroine paths despite a promising beginning in the common route (which is probably why they've been releasing so many mini-fandiscs to 'rebuild trust'). 
As for Pulltop... The original Lovekami was actually a first-class VN that showed off the best of what a fantasy charage can be.  However, its successors were... immature and pathetic in comparison (obviously written as moe-bait rather than serious efforts to continue the series).  Koi no Resort was a rather blatant effort to make a spiritual successor to the kamige Haruka ni Aogi, Uruwashi no that failed massively (primarily due to the lack of comparable sensitivity in the writing, depth of the characters, and independent strength of the heroine paths... in other words, everything).  Even Oozora and Miagete Goran visibly suffer from an excess of ambition and a lack of the ability and patience to achieve it (believe me, every time I go into a new main-company Pulltop game of late, I leave wanting to cry from disappointment).  This is pretty sad, considering that Pulltop started out as one of my favorite companies after blowing me away with Uruwashi no and Lovekami in rapid succession...
I don't think I should even have to describe what Circus does with Da Capo, lol (I could, but it would just start a salt fight).
However, it isn't just charage companies that are the culprits.  Even my beloved chuunige companies can fall victim to this kind of intellectual laziness.  Propeller, the second it lost its primary writers, forced out two massively flawed works in rapid succession (one of which - Pygmalion - , to my despair, actually got localized *spits in disgust*) that weren't even worth playing (though Pygmalion probably would have been good if they'd used a different writer and actually put forth the effort to make it into a real story).  Light, the producer of so many awesome chuunige, put out a work of penultimate laziness just a few months ago (Sora no Baroque).  Nitroplus, in a rather pathetic effort to sharpen its skills at psychedelic stories, went off the beaten track with Sumaga and Axanael.  Even Akatsuki Works, which has always been consistent, if nothing else, has of late been lowering its standards somewhat.
Understand, I am perfectly willing to accept that companies will not produce a kamige with every single project.  The idea that any company could manage that, given the limited budgets most VN companies have to work with, is fundamentally ridiculous.  I am quite willing to enjoy trips off into the wilds on occasion (such as Pulltop's surprisingly high-quality Natsuiro Recipe or Moonstone's Sakura no Mori Dreamers).  I am also willing to accept that sequels rarely match the originals.  However, I do think, if they can't match the original, they should at least build something of close to equal quality in a slightly different direction, instead.  To be specific, there was absolutely no reason to make every aspect of Tsuki ni Yorisou 2 to echo the original's beginning framework so closely (to be specific, the way he suddenly became less capable than before when the heroine paths started made me want to various unpleasant things to the writer). 
I am also willing to admit that a new set of writers means inevitable hiccups... I could have accepted that Propeller's works would need to be a bit different after Yuuichirou left the company.  I would have even been willing to shrug off Pygmalion as a fluke.  However, the way the company, rather than pulling in a single capable freelance veteran writer (of which there are plenty in the industry), dragged in a massive number of writers (all of which were mostly nukige writers) to make Jaeger.
Light... has no excuse.  Light's fanbase, whether they started with Dies Irae or have been following the company for much longer, is accustomed to high quality long games with extensive setting and character development and highly complex stories where every last element of the setting is squeezed for everything it is worth.  Sora no Baroque was a slap in the face, a game that departed greatly from the company's style, even aside from the raw quality issues.
Nitroplus did have an excuse... they were a company that was always seen as 'weird'.  Experimentation has always been their norm (which is probably why it takes them so long to recover after each release), so Sumaga, while being a massively boring abomination from the perspective of people who liked their earlier works, was understandable and forgivable.  However, Axanael... wasn't.  To be blunt, it takes a peculiar type of brain to actually enjoy those two games, even if you aren't a Nitroplus fan.
Akatsuki Works' gradual descent really has been so gradual as to have been barely noticed.  While their characters and situations have mostly maintained the quality we, the readers/players, are accustomed to, it has to be said that the gradual decreases in length and detail in the stories have been apparent for some time.  I honestly enjoyed Suisei Ginka and thought it was one of the most conceptually exceptional of the company's games in years.  However, it was also relatively short (less than fifteen hours for me is short for a chuunige) and generally over reliant on the 'Akatsuki Works Style' of VN  design to keep the reader's interest.  The 'style' is proven to work at keeping the reader's interest, but it is also so recognizable that anyone who has been reading this company's works since Ruitomo will recognize it instantly.
In other words, I just needed to spout salt about the companies I feel have gotten intellectually lazy due to past success, lol.

This one was a straight-out contest between Lost Echoes and Otoboku 3.
On the one hand, Lost Echoes has an excellent story and some seriously good heroines. 
On the other hand, Otoboku has first-class writing, first-class slice-of-life, and excellent epilogues.
In fact, it was that last element that decided the contest... the two were neck and neck, but the difference in epilogue quality, which is much more important than most people credit it for being, was huge.  Lost Echoes, for better or worse, ends very soon after the final climax for each path, and (in the VN's chronology) a month or less after the climax.  Otoboku 3, however, had detailed epilogues that dealt with the thereafter of the heroines and protagonist, which is a huge plus for remaining in my memory.
So, in the end, Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru: Trinkle Stars was VN of the Month, February 2018.
It should be mentioned that my utter inability to play sports VNs made Tsubasa no Shita a non-starter for me from the beginning (I like combat and blood sports, but other sports suck as game themes except for seishun BS).

Now, this is one of those games where the Getchu description and the one on the site don't represent the reality. 
First, this game is a straight-out comedy.  The protagonist is a 'classic baka', a character who is easily distracted, daydreams about convenient scenarios with cute females, and generally makes trouble without meaning to.  Because of his perspective, the game is pretty high pace (and not really in a good way).
The heroines include:
Chuuni Hime- A real princess from another world who is the master of the renovated love hotel that is the central stage for the story.  She is apparently a genius and a great leader... but you would never be able to tell that from the pictures of her daily life.  She is a heavy gamer (doesn't leave her room for days at a time), and she has little interest in fulfilling her stated purpose for coming to Earth.  She has a real name, but nobody uses it.
Lagunaseca- Chuuni Hime's dark elven maid.  She is a workaholic.  Seriously, that is literally the entirety of her personality.  Her only reason for living is to give of herself to others, so she is literally incapable of considering a life outside of service.  She works several part-time jobs to feed the princess, and she only sleeps three hours a day.
Stella- Stella is a rather naive young knight from the same world as Chuuni Hime and in her direct service.  She was raised on stories of female knights being raped by tentacles and orcs, along with falls into pleasure and mind break, and as a result, she is extremely... weak.  She is terrible with a sword... so much so that she is liable to trip over it when she tries to draw it out.  Since she came to Earth, she has become a light novel author, and when her editor gets onto her, she locks herself in a defunct fridge. 
Suzuka- The only earthling amongst the heroines (ironically so) and the protagonist's childhood friend.  She has a terrible case of chuunibyou (think wearing a black cape in summer and transforming her room into an alchemist's workshop), and... that is about the entirety of her personality.  Unless you get on her route, she is almost a non-entity throughout the game. 
I'm going to be blunt... this game actually starts out fairly well, but as a whole, it is very... not worth the money I put down for it. 
The first reason is the writing.  For some reason, this writer fails utterly to do anything other than the comedy right.  Even momentarily serious or romantic scenes flop (at least partly because Masaki doesn't have the brains to carry those scenes off right) badly, and because of that, it becomes hard to even enjoy the humorous scenes. 
The second reason is the artwork.  I'm going to be blunt... this game's CG's and sprites are very... low budget.  It isn't noticeable for a non-art-bigot such as myself at first, but it became bloody obvious when it came to the h-scenes and the few scenes granted a CG.  If this game had been made in 2008, I probably wouldn't have noticed anything wrong, but for a game that is being sold at right about the average price for a VN on today's commercial market, that is a huge downer.
The third, and probably the most fatal reason, is the music and voice acting.  The soundtrack for this game is... terrible.  However, that could be forgiven if it weren't for the unusual fact that this game's makers managed to botch the voice-acting.  Most of the voices in this game are horrible, with the notable exceptions of Chuuni Hime and Suzuka.  I'm going to be blunt... considering how long ago they announced this game, it is ridiculous that this low level of quality in an area where the industry standard is about as level as it is possible for what is essentially an 'art' can even exist.  All of the VAs are established names, so it is silly to make excuses about the quality of the actors.  No, this had to be a massive direction and/or production failure. 
My conclusion is that, while the concept wasn't bad, the execution for this game was downright horrible. 

I apologize if this post seems a bit disjointed, but this game was long enough that I felt a need to write as I finished the paths.
First, Otoboku 3, as the nickname implies, is the third game in the series begun with the original Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru. Unlike the previous two games, which were based in the same school, this is based in a sister school a few years after the original game (probably a few years after Futari no Elder, which apparently happened about a year after the events of the original). The biggest proof of this is that Shion, from the original game, is a teacher of several years experience at the school the protagonist attends (meaning that at least four, most likely five years passed, plus the several years of experience… so probably about eight years after the original).
The protagonist, Hisoka, is a young orphan who was raised by a friend of his parents to serve the game’s main heroine, Orihime. Hisoka is… one of those characters who can literally do just about everything to a certain extent. He can fight, he gets the highest grades, he can play piano (and pipe organs), he can cook (and do any other form of housework perfectly), and he can even draw.
He does have one huge personality flaw though… he is one of those protagonists who completely disregards his own needs, always putting others before himself. This is what gets him trapped into becoming Orihime’s bodyguard… while attending the girl’s academy with her.
He tries to live quietly, but that doesn’t last long (since Orihime instantly takes a liking to him). Before long, he is one of the three Elder Stars of the school (rofl, first it was one Elder, then 2, and now it is three of them… a bit obvious, isn’t it?). Being kind-hearted and perceptive, he ends up capturing the heart of just about every girl in the school, none of which know he is a guy.
Now, I should say that the common route of this game is… loooooooooong. In fact, it is even longer than that of Futari no Elder, which was pretty long itself… longer than Grisaia no Kajitsu’s common route, for that matter. As such, this isn’t a game for those looking for a quick common route followed by romance and sex galore. The sexual content in this game is actually quite low, lol.
I’m going to be straight with you… if you played Futari no Elder and enjoyed it, you’ll probably enjoy this one. The atmosphere is pretty close to identical, the protagonist’s role is identical to the previous two games, and probably the biggest difference is that this game is based somewhat later on in the same timeline. The reason this is important is because the game doesn’t ignore the real world… and as a result, the setting doesn’t allow for the kind of completely-closed environment the previous two games essentially were (in other words, far fewer of the characters are ‘ojousama’).
There is also one other thing that differs from the previous two games… this one has a much, much bigger emphasis on ‘slice-of-life as the story’. To be blunt, ninety percent of this game is Hisoka dealing with the various characters’ personal issues on one level or another while going about her daily business. While the same can be said, to an extent, about the first two games, the first two games also had a much more extensive focus on the heroines (longer individual heroine paths).
There are two main heroines in this game (well, obvious ones, anyway), Orihime and Mirei. Orihime is a pushy princess type, who has just been given a year of freedom after following orders her whole life. Mirei is your classic ‘new rich ojousama who is embarassed by/dislikes her father/parents’. She is sharp-edged, has an inferiority complex, but she nonetheless finds it impossible not to like the protagonist (there was one of these in both the previous games, lol).
Orihime’s ‘whim of steel’ is her defining trait throughout the game (partially encouraged by Hisoka). This continues into her path and is accompanied by her tendency toward ‘classical romanticism’ when it comes to falling in love (knight in shining armor BS).
Mirei’s growth during the game is perhaps the most obvious of the heroines, because she starts out as a living mass of inferiority complexes, defiance toward her position in life, and jealousy. The fact that, underneath all those negative aspects, she is actually fundamentally a good person (if somewhat dry and cynical by nature), is something that gradually comes to the surface during the course of the story. Mirei’s path is stand-alone, and it can be said that it has the strongest independent character development of all the paths in the game. There are several reasons I can think of for this, but the main one is that Mirei, due to her position at the school and as an individual, spends less time around Hisoka than the other heroines (most of the other ones aggressively seek Hisoka out or live in the same dorm).
Hana takes the same role as Kana-chan and Fumi from the previous two games, being the protagonist’s ‘imouto’ at the school. She is very devoted and innocent, but her clumsiness makes her an object of constant humor and moe for the people around her. Hana’s path splits off from somewhere just short of the midpoint of Mirei’s path. As a heroine, she is easily the weakest of the group (this can be said of her predecessors, Fumi and Kana as well), as she spends most of the game essentially being an appendage of the protagonist, her role almost exclusively involving making him look good (to be a bit overly blunt, lol). As such, she was the last heroine I chose to follow (I wrote the character intros before I actually played the paths).  This path, unlike most of the others, has little in the way of 'outer influences' to create drama.  This is because Hana is essentially a 'normal' girl.  To be honest, I don't like the way that Takaya excessively modeled certain of this path's aspects after that of Kana's from the original Otoboku (though there is no attempt to grasp for tears in this one).  It didn't really fit Hana's personality or character as a whole, though having Hana gain more confidence and take a more active role in her own life was a definite positive element.  Really, the best would have been to avoid having Hana as a heroine at all, but having the 'imouto' as a heroine has become an Otoboku tradition...
Ayame and Sumire are twins who share a route in this game. Sumire is serious and straightforward, even slightly uptight. She prefers to act on logic and have a rational basis for any action she takes. Ayame is more intuitive, an artist by nature. Sumire is the school president and Ayame is the student council secretary. Their path is a rare twin love path (one of my favorite types), but it is pretty clear from the beginning that Takaya didn’t take this path that seriously, since it is easily the weakest one in the game.
Ibara Kyouko is the protagonist’s collaborator and backup bodyguard, a young woman with a sharp tongue and a fondness for teasing Hana in particular and everyone else in general. She obviously has some kind of darkness in her past, but she is very weak to Hisoka in general, though she is good at hiding it (or at least better than everyone else, anyway). Her path splits off from Orihime’s path (literally, the two paths split off at the end, just before things spill over into romance), and the ending is fairly amusing, given the personalities of the three involved (sharp-tongued and logical Kyouko, the whimsical dreamer genius Orihime, and the natural mediator Hisoka).
Matsuri is the game’s resident yurufuwa heroine. She is a violinist in the middle of a slump, who was sent to the school (which doesn’t have a musical support program) to recover after she became unable to use her arm properly for reasons unknown. Like Ayame, she is an artist, but she is very soft-natured and slow to speak. She is also probably the ‘happiest’ heroine on the surface of things, as very little seems to get her down, at first glance (another quality she shares with Ayame from the twins). Her path is surprisingly long (of the individual paths, it is probably the third longest), and I honestly enjoyed having her as a heroine.
For the information of those who are interested, depending on which of the final choices you picked, you get a different set of scenes for summer vacation, and depending on what heroine you ‘picked’ (based on your choices as a whole), who the protagonist spends his free time with at the culture festival changes. This is pretty much the only major change made to the common route based on your choices before the heroine routes, which might bother some of you.
For the most part, the endings in this game meet my approval, showing the characters years later, as opposed to merely just after the climax of the story. This applies even to the twins, who have the weakest path in the game. This is probably because the common route ends only a few months before graduation for Hisoka and the other third year students…
The writing in this came, as is par for the course with any game written by Takaya Aya, is first-class. Despite this game mostly being slice-of-life, I can’t really all it a charage or a moege, since not one scene in this game is meaningless, for all its immense length.
Visually, this game is Caramel Box to the core. If you like Caramel Box’s visual style, you’ll like the artwork. Otherwise, you won’t.
Musically, this game reuses some tracks from the previous Otoboku games, but I honestly only noticed this because I compared it on a whim. The important thing is that the music is used quite well.
It should be noted that about 1/3 of Hisoka’s lines are voiced, which is about standard for all of the recent works from Caramel Box and is effective for helping create Hisoka’s character and give life to him.
Overall, this is a first-class game. In some ways, it falls short of Futari no Elder… but Futari no Elder was something of a miracle kamige, so that was inevitable. I do wish that they’d spent more time on the individual heroine paths, but the degree to which the characters were developed in the course of the common route really made long heroine paths unnecessary. Oh, incidentally… I wish Miimi was a heroine, since she was my favorite character. I also loved her narration during the play scene.

 

Well, as of thirty-nine minutes ago, it is officially my birthday (as of the time I checked at the beginning of making this post).  I have a lot of things to reflect on this year. 
I am now thirty-six, settling into the beginnings of middle-age, knowing my lifestyle will probably kill me before I hit fifty. 
I'm a sugar addict, I love fatty foods, I make my own alcoholic drinks (this year, a mixed fruit wine that actually turned out well and was much easier than the rum and hard root beer I did last year). 
I sit on my ass eighty percent of the time, I am hugely fat...
... and I'm surprisingly happy.  I won't say I don't have my down moments.  Looking back, I regret not going for more athletic pursuits while my knees and back could still stand them.  I regret not trying for a more regular and less... frustrating line of work.  However, I can honestly say that, for all its frustrations, I actually seem to like being a fat, balding otaku who has pretensions at being  some kind of VN guru (lol).
I do wish that I could fit into a plane seat, lol.  If I ever go to Japan, it is going to have to be a sea trip, since buying two plane tickets for one person is both embarrassing and more than a little expensive.
I hate my work, but I'm good at it and, in good times, it pays well, so I keep doing it.
So what would I change? 
Honestly, it is hard to say.  I won't pretend I'm all love and joy when it comes to life.  I have too much toxic waste going through my brain for that (I just happened to have gained just enough maturity not to feed the trolls constantly *smiles dryly*).  I'm fundamentally a passive person once I set foot outside my hobbies, preferring not to do anything I don't absolutely have to do.  I'm also negative and misanthropic... but is that stuff I actually want to change?
*shrugs*
I've never been any other way, so it is impossible to say.  However, every year I hit this day and wonder what could have been, which probably says everything that needs to be said about my experiences with life, for all my proclamations of relative happiness.