Darklord Rooke

I think Bats just enjoys torturing everybody

A blog is an easily accessible collection of a person's thoughts and analyses. A forum is for discussion on relevant topics. There is some crossover, a person can put their blog posts onto a forum for discussion, but the blog aspect is useful if you want to access a place where you can easily find all of a person's "work", so to speak. For example, I'll be posting my thoughts on writing technique in my blog. That way, if anybody wants to read my thoughts on writing technique they can just go to my profile and click my blog link. It beats trawling through multiple threads on a forum and it's useful for me because I won't have to write the same thing out over and over again. If somebody wants to read Clephas' thoughts on the many VNs he's played, they can go to his profile and click on his blog. And so on. So it serves a purpose.

Those are my thoughts as well.

In general younger characters tend to be more boring. They also have less potential to be interesting - less history, less experience, less depth, heart on their sleeve like a typical teenager, overly dramatic, and with little perspective. And spare me from yet another bland high school story. As for moe, it just ticks me off. I love your posts.

Scarily so...

While I never make use of such things, you DO see requests for save files everywhere. Really good idea!

Bloc voting killed it. In fact, viewer participation pretty much killed it.

Skyrim's better than that shit called "Oblivion." But neither are as good as Morrowind.

Dearest ESA Fuck off Kindest regards, Rooke.

Yeah, the A.I was intolerable in vanilla P3. Lack of control is only an option if you can trust your teammates to make semi-sensible decisions. They don't have to be tactical whizzes, but they do have to display some sort of ability to react and think for themselves. Was pretty damn frustrating.

Added in Palas' figures, also: Loren the Amazon Princess – 45,443 ± 9,080 Magical Diary – 71,005 ± 11,349 The Yawhg – 55,384 ± 10,023 They are pretty expensive. Definitely good though. I'm a little disappointed to see they haven't sold very well

Some Steamspy data I nicked from 4chan cause I was bored. Long Live The Queen - 263,665 ± 21,860 people own this game on Steam Sakura Spirit - 141,536 ±16,021 Analogue: A Hate Story - 134,909 ±15,641 Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ - 97,513 ±13,299 Hatoful Boyfriend - 83,312 ± 12,293 Rising Angels: Reborn - 86,626 ±12,535 Cherry Tree High Comedy Club - 77,159 ± 11,830 Hate Plus - 76,685 ±11,794 Magical Diary - 71,005 ± 11,349 Huniepop - 63,431 ± 10,727 The Yawhg - 55,384 ± 10,023 Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos - 46,390 ± 9,174 Loren the Amazon Princess - 45,443 ± 9,080 Cinders - 44,970 ± 9,032 NEKOPARA Vol. 1 - 44,496 ±8,984 Cherry Tree High I! My! Girls! - 42,130 ± 8,742 WORLD END ECONOMiCA episode.01 - 38,816 ±8,391 War of the Human Tanks - 39,763 ± 8,493 Roommates - 28,402 ± 7,178 Sakura Angels - 19,881 ±6,006 Fading Hearts - 17,515 ± 5,637 If My Heart Had Wings - 16,568 ± 5,482 Always Remember Me - 15,148 ± 5,242 planetarian ~the reverie of a little planet~ - 11,834 ±4,633 Unhack - 10,887 ± 4,444 eden* - 9,467 ±4,144 fault milestone one - 7,574 ±3,707 Pyrite Heart - 5,680 ±3,210 Dandelion - Wishes brought to you - 4,734 ± 2,930 Cho Dengeki Stryker - 3,314 ±2,452 Oblivious Garden ~ Carmina Burana - 2,840 ± 2,270 Princess Evangile - 2,467 ± 4,833 Littlewitch Romanesque: Editio Regia - 1,378 ± 2,700 Nameless ~ The one thing you must recall ~ - 1,378 ± 2,700 Sunrider Academy - 473 ±926 Free ones: Everlasting Summer - 308,161 ± 23,631 Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius - 266,978 ± 21,997 Narcissu 1st & 2nd - 134,909 ± 15,641 Without Within - 97,040 ± 13,267 Rising Angels: Reborn - 86,626 ± 12,535 http://steamspy.com/

And so we begin...really really late. Sorry bout that but RL got hectic for a few weeks. PS: I cut this blog post down from 3,000 words, to less than 1,500. You're welcome Welcome to the start of my blog series. The way I’ll organise this critique is to go through different writing techniques first, and then showcase how they were badly used by Winged Cloud. Unfortunately due to very strict time-constraints I’ll have to split this first entry into 2 components, so in this blog post I’ll discuss the first writing technique, in the next blog post I’ll analyse how that technique was used in the game. Then in the blog post after I’ll introduce the next writing technique and so forth. Eventually I may even get to story, character, and the purpose of scenes. Bear in mind the following are my thought processes about writing techniques, which I assembled myself. A necessary Beginning What is “good writing?” “Good writing” is the flimsy excuse people on the internet use to give their criticisms weight. If you don’t like a book because the book isn’t for you, then the reason you didn’t like the book would lie on your shoulders. That sounds an awful lot like being your fault. People never want things to be their fault, it’s right up there with taking responsibility for their actions. Ew, who wants to do that? But if you said you didn’t like it because it was badly written, well, then the fault is the book’s and not yours. This is a much better feeling to have. But seriously, what is “good writing?” Well, "good writing" is what happens when you take on-board every piece of writing advice given to you over the years and produce a novel which is completely unsellable. That book could be said to have been written in a “good style.” AHHH! WHAT IS “GOOD WRITING?!” Okay, okay, the concept is ludicrously straight forward. A story-teller has a story they wish to tell, and in a novel the writing is the method with which that story is conveyed to the reader. If the storyteller can convey vivid and engaging images of the scenes to the reader, then they have succeeded. If the images are not so well conveyed, they could still have succeeded. If the imagery and pacing have been completely screwed, then we can say the writing is not good. A writer’s goal will always be to maximise the impact of their writing so the image is conveyed in an impactful way. Language techniques will be the tools the writer will use, and this goal will consumer their lives. In a visual novel the concept is much the same, but less involved. The writer must still convey the bit that are not shown by visuals and sound to the audience. Simple, no? So now on to the first technique. Technique #1 - Show vs Tell, and when to use each Ugh, what a clichéd piece of advice to begin with. Well, there’s a very good reason I started here, and it involves a hat and some small pieces of paper. But let us delve into this "oft-dished-out" piece of advice. Everybody always tells budding writers to “show” and don’t “tell,” but the truth is if writers always followed this advice their work would be bloated, it would be boring, and it would be so weighty that nobody would be able to lift the damn thing. A writer will “show” some bits, and they’ll “tell” some bits. What technique they use at each point is a decision only the writer themselves can answer (this is part of a writer’s “style.”) So, what does it mean when a writer “tells” something. Well, what generally happens is the narrator observes the circumstances happening around them, but instead of funnelling these observations to the reader, the narrator funnels the conclusions they draw instead. These conclusions will tend to be short, categorical statements (like he was tall, or he was miffed) because that is what we humans tend to do, make a bunch of observations, condense these observations into a conclusion which fits nicely into a category, and file that information away. When this method is overused the problems it can cause are many - not enough information to produce a decent image (you’ve reduced the information so it fits into a bite-size statement,) each person categorises things differently (leading to incorrect images being formed,) and pacing issues (galore.) For example, if a reader is told a man is angry, this not only limits information and leads to a less detailed image, but people associate "anger" with different behaviours depending on their own experience and the environment they grew up in. So where the character actually clenched their fists and glared, the reader could have imagined him dropping to his knees, repeatedly whacking himself on the head with a tea kettle, and screeching to the heavens. This affects character development. But we humans tend to have very few stock images for each category, so what happens if more than one person in the story is “angry?” What happens if 4 people got “angry”? 6 people got “angry?” Then the reader will be imagining multiple people whacking themselves on the head with a tea kettle. And if everybody gets angry at once? Well, let's just hope there’s a hell of a lot of tea kettles. But it doesn’t stop there, every “chair” would be the same, every “2 story brick house” would be the same, every “table”, every “hand”. All “approaching footsteps” would sound the same, even if one of the characters had a peg-leg, and another was a fat, slobby, 4-legged centaur who cried great, soppy tears whenever he had to climb a set of stairs. And we’re still not done, because that’s not the only thing an overuse of “tell” does. An overuse of “tell” takes away the manipulation of pacing a writer wields at his disposal. By it’s very nature, the lack of description in “tell” automatically speeds up the pace of events, but during those periods where you want to denote a passing of time or during those periods where you want to slow down the story, more description is added to give the reader an actual and innate feeling that time has passed. When a writer “tells” a reader that "half an hour has passed," it doesn’t give the reader a visceral sense that time has, actually, passed. However, wondering about the significance of a man’s hitched up trousers for 5 or 6 very long paragraphs will impart a VERY visceral sense of time passing to the reader. So, does a writer need to "show" everything with their prose? No. Often you may not want much detail, sometimes you’ll want to speed up the pace of the scene. Maybe you want to employ default reader images somewhere in your story (here a writer can use “tell” to their considerable advantage.) Flip to any page of any published book and it will always contain a mixture of “show” and “tell.” What mixture you choose will depend on what style you want to employ. But the reason this piece of advice is so clichéd is because many people don’t put enough detail into their writing to impart a decent image to the reader. How this applies to Visual Novels Visual Novels are a different medium to novels, and with their inclusion of visuals and sound the prose doesn't need to be as dense. But unless the visuals and sounds paint a complete picture, like in The Walking Dead, some prose will still be necessary and standard writing techniques apply. Next Post: How Sakura Spirit handled this technique Next Next Post: Redundancy, bloat, and the value of precision.

Heh, well it was Zaka's idea. It's only fitting he gets the honour of...

Seems so. I'm really not interested in those who only want to use Fuwa as a glorified seedbox, that being said the announcement ideally should be in an easily visible place. I disagree with the idea that they should know to read the forum rules, people don't read the forum rules for updates on site direction. That's front page stuff really. But the front page won't be ready for a while, so I think Zaka's solution is the best.

About time! There's too few good JRPGs going around.

Only high-level masochists should experience Neko Para.

Bible Black

Rance is a turn-based strategy game first and foremost, the plot isn't actually necessary. For some people it's icing on the cake, for others it turns them off, but the emphasis of Sengoku Rance is squarely on the gameplay.

Thank you, I'll definitely be giving it a try a little later on. Definitely not enough information out there about this title.

As a massive fan of RPGs, I'm treating this title with suspicion and caution.

While they are the equivalent of US young adult fiction, that in no way means it should be as popular. There's many reasons for this. Plenty of older adults read young adult fiction, mainly because the speculative fiction genre has become a bit serious and the young adult genre offers more opportunities for pure, escapist entertainment. They won't read LNs because of the next point. The writing techniques in light novels are fairly different to the writing techniques in most young adult. They have more emphasis on telling, and contain far more modifying words. In fact, the techniques in a lot of Japanese LNs and VNs are associated with "bad technique" in the western world. The older a person gets the more discerning they are, so there's very little chance of light novels selling to older people like young adult novels do, and the normal reader base shrinks enormously because of this. I've got Harry Potter in front of me and am comparing them to some LN's, and Rowling's books read a lot more naturally. In fact, I've got translated Russian books which read far more naturally than some of the LN's I have. I don't think it's a case of poor marketing, the anime and manga fanbase is actually quite large. Yet despite the size of the anime and manga fanbase the LN industry is pretty tiny I believe. For genre fiction writing style is important, and most LNs read very unnaturally in english.

Light novels have been licensed by companies before and not many people buy them. I honestly think it'd be a waste of time and resources.