Salurian

It depends on the grind we're talking about. I dislike the long drawn out grind of MMOs, but can at least tolerate it if I have podcasts to listen to or Netflix to watch as I grind. Also, I find it hilarious when people complain about free to play games being pay to win, and then refuse to play subscription based MMOs. One way or the other the company needs money to continue to generate new content to keep the player base in game and active. For free to play games, that comes down to vanity items and pay to win items, with pay to win generally making more money because people are lazy. Subscription services at least are up front where they are charging you and everyone else the same amount. On the other hand, when it is the grind of 'learning to win' I have no problem at all failing over and over again until I beat whatever it is. Case in point would be a lot of old school RPGs and games. For more recent examples, the Dark Souls series. Even if I have yet to actually finish a Souls game (for some reason I keep losing interest 3/4 of the way through after I hit a certain tier of power).

Voting for Ever 17 because I feel more people need to read it.

**Adds Chiitrans Lite to the long list of programs he uses for translating JP VNs**

Glad that I don't sleepwalk. Instead I have the opposite problem and have to worry about rare cases of sleep paralysis instead, oh joy... Back to the original topic... I'm fairly sure the absolute worst I've had this happen was when I finished my undergraduate and I basically completely hikkimomori'd for half a year afterward. I only came out at night, I barely interacted with other people, and basically just vegged for a bit. I distinctly remember starting a day thinking it was Thursday, and I went through most of the day thinking it was Thursday. I later went to my local miniatures/card game store thinking it was Thursday and I would get my normal Thursday night games in... and it wasn't Thursday. It was Sunday. I still have no idea how I got that badly off. --- Oh, and I will also say this: Even though I'm graduated with my master's degree and have finished my planned schooling, every so often I still wake up going NOOOO LATE FOR EXAM!!!... followed by swearing as blissful reality sets in. I can only hope that will fade as I grow older.

It depends on the person in question. I do not give out recognition for people who I think have just... done what they are supposed to do. I wouldn't expect praise for a mediocre job performance either. If I tell you to do a job, and then you do a mediocre job of it and expect praise, you aren't going to get any. If, however, I tell you to do a job and then you work hard and do a good job of it, I'll thank you/praise you for doing a good job. You should be recognized and get approval for doing work above and beyond the norm. You should not, however, get recognized for doing mediocre work that anyone else could do. When I get praised for doing good work, or I give praise out, it should mean something. But, that said, that doesn't mean that I'm necessarily doing the good work for the praise. In my case, half the time I get praised at work these days is because I am lazy. Let me give an example: We handle cases for customers. Each case has a string associated with it that has relevant information such as customer, case number, and other such fields. We need to send email forms out with regards to these cases. Recently because we had trouble sending to certain contacts, we developed a 'clean' form that was meant to get past spam and email blockers. The only problem was, our mailer software could only generate the form, but we'd have to manually change the content in the email itself (replace CUSTOMERNAME with the actual customer name, for example). This inevitably takes time copying and pasting all of this information, and increased our handling time for cases. I am lazy, and I got tired of having to spend five minutes + to copy and paste these, so I wrote a quick script that would take the case string and generate the clean entire form off of it. No fuss. Took me maybe an hour or two to write. You enter the string, hit a button, and a few seconds later voila. Done. Suddenly a 5 minute job becomes a 5 second job, my coworkers love me because it's far less of a pain to generate the form now, my bosses love me because my coworkers are handling the cases faster. And while I'm enjoying the praise and whatnot, I'm also kinda going 'but I did that because I was lazy... oh well!'

Don't get me started on how cultural values like a low context culture vs. a high context culture influences everything about how people interact via language. Don't do it... don't... gah. Alright. Because now I'm thinking about it. And I may as well use something I learned when I was writing my thesis... Americans, by our very nature, have a low context culture. The most likely reason for this is because of the very mixed nature of our population. When you have a lot of different cultures in the same place, you cannot always rely on people to infer exactly what you mean. Which inevitably means that, when dealing with these other cultures, you have to explain exactly what you mean. Ever notice that when someone has some crazy over the top scientific/technical explanation, there's always someone who asks for it in 'plain English'? That's the kind of explanation I'm talking about. How to explain it... You know how inside jokes work, right? Well, inside jokes are high context. If you are talking with two people, one who is in on the joke and one who never heard of the joke, only the one who's on the inside joke is going to laugh. The other guy's just going to be confused. So you explain the joke... but it's not necessarily as funny, because you had to explain it. But at least that person understands the joke now. Complicated English means only those who can 'translate' those concepts understand. You use simple English and everyone understands. So people use simpler English to get their point across, and then people claim that the language is being 'dumbed down'. Now, you think that's bad, you start dealing with high context cultures and the translations of their language... like Japanese. Japan is a high-context culture. They have a very unmixed population, with the residents of Japan pretty overwhelmingly being... well, Japanese. So they can get away without all of those additional explanations and just infer them instead. If you go up to the Japanese Help Thread (for translators) in the Fan Translation boards, you'll very soon note that the translators are always asking for the context of the conversation. This is because in Japanese a series of kanji can mean one thing in one context, but can mean something else entirely in a different context. Fun times. Personally, I'm just going to ignore anyone who claims that the English language is dying, dumber, or whatever. Languages change over time. It's what they do. Let it change. And then when I'm old, I'll sit out on my lawn and yell at kids and their slang I don't understand. Darn whippersnappers.

My older sister (3 years older, specifically) and I get along fine, but we're not particularly close. We never really have been - our interests are mostly too far apart and our personalities are completely different. But, that said, we do both share a liking for skiing and scuba diving, and will go out and do such sports together if we happen to be together on a family vacation. It's probably a good thing I never had a younger sister though. I probably would have been an overprotective older brother and spoiled her rotten.

Shelled out some last minute money toward the Muvluv Kickstarter.

Basic visual novel functionality - text display, manipulation of images, ect - is generally easy to find an engine for. Barring particularly... ambitious designs, at this point it's just simply best that VN developers look into all of the options and find the one that a) fits what they want to create and b) they are comfortable with creating content with, and use that one. It's generally less of a matter of one being skies above better than the other, it's a matter of the engine being a good fit for the developer and their VN. If the engine doesn't have the functionality that the creator is looking for, move on to one that hopefuly does. If it has that functionality, but requires the use of something the developer may not be comfortable with, try and find something that works. Look at the options available. Do your research. Worst comes to worst, depending on their ability there is always the option of creating one's own proprietary engine. On a side note, I will say that KiriKiri2 is all over the place though, speaking as someone who plays a lot of Japanese VNs. It's probably one of the most common, if not the most common engine I see being used in the games I play.

Innocent Grey games - Cartagra/Kara no Shoujo/Kara no Shoujo 2 - all three are translated now - start with Cartagra and if you like it proceed to KnS and KnS 2. KID 'Infinity' series - Ever 17, notably, though I don't recall there being H-scenes - still a great sci-fi story though

I remember a friend of mine (who I've been trying to get to play the series) expressing surprise that it'd made its kickstarter goal so fast. Maybe if it breaks a mil I'll finally be able to get him to check it out...

For some reason I feel the need to argue with this one, but I already know what you mean (or at least I think I do). It's just that I feel it needs additional qualifiers. I'd personally change it to not liking common routes that are very long, with heroine routes that are very short. This can be done well, mind you, but it feels somewhat lacking when you finally go down a heroines route almost for it to instantly be over. Generally speaking, the longer the individual routes the more I tend to like the game. This is because: a) Assuming the routes remain roughly on par with one another length-wise, you get that much more story out of each route - instead of one common route being longer, you get 4-5 different routes being longer. b) Some games come dangerously close to 'whambamthankyouma'am' progression of confession to kiss to sex to happy ending, more or less one after another. I'd rather see the long, slow romance where the character's relationship actually gets to develop. Now, this obviously depends on how crazy you are going with heroines - a game with 2-4 heroines is going to have longer routes than games with 5+ (most of the time, some game makers STILL manage to deliver long individual routes with that many...). --- Oh, that made me think of another turn-off. Well, less of a turn-off and more of an extreme annoyance: Side heroines who are much better than the actual heroines that don't get actual routes, even in the inevitable fandisk.

If it makes you feel any better, I've been waiting for years for Seinarukana to get translated into English. I'll second Utawarerumono. 999 is on my own list of games to play, as I've heard it is very good.

After playing enough of them, if there is one thing you learn from VNs it is what your fetishes are. Even ones that you had no idea even existed... Of course, the exact opposite is also true - you find out exactly what a lot of your turnoffs are as well.

When Jast USA finally releases it, depending on the translation quality I'd recommend Seinarukana. Which is supposedly "Soon", as in the few months. It's by Xuse, and is the sequel to Eien no Aselia. While it shares the same general universe, you don't really need to have played Eien no Aselia to play Seinarukana - I played them out of order and still enjoyed both games. The said, the character designs are generally more adult, and personally I found the gameplay and storyline to be much better in Seinarukana. It is not out yet in English, but after years of waiting it does finally look pretty close to being released.

If you could read the original Japanese, characters from Sekai de Ichiban Dame na Koi are good for this. It's one of the few Japanese VNs I've seen that has an older guy (28) as the main character, and some of the heroines are his age or, at least, in university level. And it's a game that treats the age difference at least somewhat seriously as well. It's a good VN too. To a certain extent, you may be able to find some older looking characters in fantasy/sci-fi games as well, since they can divorce themselves from the standard school romantic comedy that you get with most VNs. Unfortunately the lion's share of said games are untranslated...

Ah, sorry I did not make myself more clear - I'm well aware of how the Japanese feel about anime and visual novels. That does not change the fact, however, that there are concepts inherent to Japan that straight up do not exist in the US, where I am. For example: Japanese honorifics and keigo in general - I'd run into it in anime, but I didn't really get a solid feel for it until I had read a lot of VNs in Japanese. It took me awhile to wrap my mind that when trying to be formal/humble the language changes so much. The Tanabata festival - I knew nothing of this, but after seeing it come up again and again I now immediately know what is going on when someone references it. White Day - same as Tanabata, though I think I came across this in anime first. Japanese bathing practices - shower/clean/scrub, THEN get in the bathtub Proper Japanese greetings ... Are we seeing what I mean here? I'm not talking about the culture of visual novels and anime in Japan, I am talking about aspects of Japanese culture that are found in Japanese VNs. While yes, there may be some erroneous tropes that exist in VNs that don't exist in real life in Japan, that doesn't change the fact that you can still learn quite a bit about life over there from VNs.

I will say that VNs in general have left me more open minded about certain things - acknowledging cultural differences we have with Japan, understanding that while I might not enjoy a certain concept (see biggest turn-offs thread) others can and do. There are certain story concepts found in VNs that I hardly ever see elsewhere as well, and as an occasional GM for pen and paper RPGs they give me sources to draw from the confound my players quite nicely. Otherwise... I can't say that any specific visual novel in particular has changed my life. There are certain stories that left me an emotional wreck (I still can't hear the song Aozora without tearing up a little), but I got over those soon enough. If anything, the number one influence they've had is simply just providing me a way to relax and enjoy a night to myself.

Muvluv Alternative Fate/Stay Night Gore Screaming Show Ever 17

Ah, I thought of another one: Bad/particularly annoying voice actors. Now, generally speaking, this is an extremely rare problem. The quality of JP VAs is high enough that I almost never run into this. But I have run into VAs that annoyed me enough that I had to actively avoid the route they were on, even if I otherwise liked the character. I will also note that, after a certain point, you start recognizing certain VAs and go 'oh, she's voicing this character'... which can either be a yay or a meh depending on the VA. Especially if the VA is working over time and seems to be in every single game you play.

Hah, no. Though mind you, I do enjoy the Mass Effect series (I've been a Bioware fan in general since they first started making games way back with Baldur's Gate). Thanks for the greetings all.

Just have to be in the right mood for those kinds of games. With regards to xray, I'm fine with 'normal' uses of it. It's when it goes to various extreme forms for me that it is a no (see above baby note).

At this point I'm just trying to keep better track of what I am playing more than I am rating. In all honesty I only vaguely even remember Irotoridori no Sekai these days, as I played it on initial release when it came out in Japan. I do remember quite enjoying it though. As games get translated into English I've taken to going back and replaying them, which has been somewhat interesting. Still waiting on that JAST translation of Seinarukana to finally finish, at which point I may disappear off the face of the earth for a week or so.

It depends on the tsundere type (because yes, there are subtypes to this archetype -_-) The classic tsundere is the one I like, where they start off hard/antagonistic to the main character, but gradually as you win them over you thaw them out, they go all 'dere' on you, and they stay that way unless the MC does something stupid. More 'modern' tsunderes are hard at first, and then they soften up... and then they go hard, then soft, and hard, and soft until you have whiplash. Depending on the character, that can be very annoying to deal with.

In my case... you know the character archetype where there's a guy who is a friend of the protagonist, wears glasses, is really smart and is generally liked by everyone but doesn't seem to have any interest in dating... but gives the protagonist good advice about his relationships with the other girls that ends up really helping him later down the line? That was me in high school. I might have gotten a Normal Ending, but I prevented so many Bad Endings in the process...