ChaosRaven

I guess it's a parody about nukiges then. Though, considering I'm absolutely no fan of comedy VN's and even less of naughty ones, I'd probably even prefer to read a real nukige instead.

It's actually hard to think anything else after reading the synopsis: And I honestly don't think I'd even want to read a 'story VN' with such a plot.

So Getchu's Bishoujo Game Awards 2018 are out and the glorious winner is: Summer Pockets! Congratulations to Key. It follows a list of the twenty best VN's of the contest: 1.) Summer Pockets by Key (Also winner of Scenario, Music and Movie awards) 2.) Rance 10 by Alice Soft (Also winner of System award) 3.) Riddle Joker by Yuzusoft (Also winner of graphics and character awards with Arihara Nanami) 4.) Nukige Mitai na Shima ni Sunderu Watashi wa Dou Surya Ii Desu ka? by Qruppo 5.) Amazing Grace - What color is your attribute? by Cabbage Soft 6.) Fuukan no Grasesta by Eushully 7.) Love x Holic ~Miwaku no Otome to Hakudaku Kankei~ by Atelier Kaguya Bare & Bunny NSFW (Also winner of Ero award) 8.) Mirai Radio to Jinkou-bato by Laplacian 9.) Motto! Haramase! Honoo no Oppai Isekai Ero Mahou Gakuen! by Milk Factory NSFW 10.) Sora ni Kizanda Parallelogram by Uguisu Kagura 11.) Trinoline: Genesis by Minori 12.) Deatte 5-fun wa Ore no Mono! Jikan Teishi to Atropos by Hulotte 13.) Onee-chan no Yuuwaku by Hibiki Works 14.) Raspberry Cube by Madosoft 15.) Kari Gurashi Ren'ai by Asa Project 16.) 9 -Nine- Sorairo Sorauta Soranooto by Palette 17.) Deep One by Nameless 18.) Kotonoha Maichiru Natsu no Koe by Silky's Plus Dolce 19.) Kuroinu 2 ~In'yoku ni Somaru Haitoku no Miyako, Futatabi~ by Liquid NSFW 20.) Erewhon by Clock Up NSFW I'm honestly speechless - I've never seen 6 nukiges in the top 20 before. Summer Pockets' copy & paste of Island will also hardly win an innovation price with the two most overused tropes in eroge history - school life and time travel. And most of the other stuff also looks pretty generic. Even a few simple fan discs made it in. IMHO, only Mirai Radio to Jinkou-bato and Deep One look somewhat interesting. Not even the Eushully title looks particular appealing this time. While Yuzusoft's Riddle Joker couldn't win the award this time, they're still the top seller according to Getchu's sales ranking 2018. Overall, 2018 seems to have been a rather weak year for visual novels.

If I could go back in time, I'd definitely skip the first one - or at least the Extra story arc. Alternative had more than enough flashbacks to clear up the missing pieces.

Yes, they have completely different stories and characters. First part is also much weaker. I think he was just trolling, because calling the Rance series as a whole 'underrated' and 'hardly anyone talks about' is just ridiculous.

Yes, that's pretty much how I approach all my Japanese VN's as well. I also find the voices very helpful for understanding the dialogs, because mood and subtle meanings are often communicated via vocal accentuations and not necessarily through the text.

Too bad that she's 95% of time in loli-form. Shion is a main heroine in Koihime - at least in the first one. I think only Aisha had more scenes than her. Anyway, most good Milf VN's are untranslated - mostly stuff from Astronauts: Sirius, Anim and Alice Soft. I think various Lilith nukiges with Milf's are translated, but those are pretty hardcore.

No doubt about that - it's most likely an edited machine translation or at least a machine assisted translation. I'm only going through that mess because I wanted to read it in Japanese with a text hooker anyway. Certainly not a release I'd recomment anyone to read with even the slightest translation standards.

Realistic: 428 ~Fuusa Sareta Shibuya de~ Semi-realistic: Fata morgana no Yakata Umineko (with PS graphics) Everything from Innocent Grey Everything drawn by M&M (Astronauts: Sirius / Atelier Kaguya) Everything drawn by Sei Shoujo (Empress) Though judging by your examples, only 428, Fata Morgana and 'maybe' even Innocent Grey might fit the bill. BTW, just saw that One day in London is now complete. Guess I should give that a try again some time. Though judging from when I read the first chapter, it was more detective game than VN. Art is gorgeous though.

Reading Midori no Umi now. I was interested in that VN for quite some time - mostly because I've a mysterious mansion fetish and the VN looked very interesting in that regard. I also have the Japanese harcopy lying around for over a year now, waiting to be read. It was therefore a bit of a surprise when SakuraGame suddenly came along with it's pseudo western release. The translation is obviously bad, but it's still better than what Atlas is spitting out, so it's at least better than nothing. Anyway, at the beginning of the VN I really thought I'd have fallen in a large sugar storage, with half of the inhabitants of the secret mansion being moe heroines and the other half sweet little kids. However, a few hours reading later... I've died four times now. Two times I was murdered, one time I ran away with a heroine and we both got lost and died, and one time I went insane. In addition to that, the heroine I wanted to romance seems to be a dangerous yandere that threatened me and now I'm scared of her. So I'm slowly getting the impression that this isn't just a run of the mill moege. It's getting more interesting the further I read, but no kidding, the VN gets really depressing after a while and it's slowly getting to me. It's a good thing that I have some fluffy 'emergency moeges' lying around to get my mood up again.

But that's just the Bayesian rating, which is low for almost every VN with a low vote count. The actual rating is 8.11 which is actually pretty high - I wouldn't call that an underdog anymore. Anyway, one of my hidden favorites would be probably the old Moero Downhill Night 2 from Jast. It's a moege which was inspired by the racing anime Initial D (which I'm a big fan of). I never understood why it's rated with just a low 6.44 even if it has a way more creative story than most other moeges. Maybe it was punished because it wasn't a damn school life moege.

This always got me wondering if couples in Japan have to do it with a blindfold - but I guess not even Japan would be that crazy. Not a fan of mosaics, since it's often abused to not draw anything at all behind huge blocks of annoyance. Though, it's kinda acceptable if they are very small and the artists did their homework good enough to let your imagination do the uncensoring job.

This looks actually quite interesting. I'll keep an eye on it.

This and Chaos;Child are completely different VN's and I have very different expectations from them. Nora is just a fan service heavy moege and I don't expect any deep story from it.

Nah, Himawari is sitting far below with a 7.8 which isn't particular high for a story VN. No comparison to the 8.5 'kamige without flaws' rating of Chaos;Child.

Finished Chaos;Child as well - or to be precise, its common route. Unfortunately, I wasn't particularly impressed by it. (Warning: Rant incoming!!!) If I would sum up the experience of Chaos;Child in just a few words, I'd say it had a quite good start, a somewhat mediocre middle part and a horrible ending. Long story: roughly the first third of the story was actually quite decent. The murder cases were interesting, the protagonist much more bearable than in Chaos;Head and the heroines likable. I also liked the fact that the VN had a more 'traditional' cast of moe heroines with routes. Many story VN's forfeit the romance parts for the sake of the plot. That's not really a bad thing, however moeges are popular for a reason. And my vision of a 'perfect VN' has well written heroine routes with romance and moe embedded in a good story. However, this combination is so rare that I could only name two VN's that succeeded at it - Fate/Stay Night and G-Senjou no Maou. Maybe even Sharin no Kuni as well, but that's more or less it. The majority of other good story VN's either don't have romance at all or it's so minor that it's of almost no relevance. For that reason, I had high hopes for this VN after the promising start. Towards the second third of the VN - the middle part - the VN started to show certain 'signs' that made me worried. To give some background about that, I want to bring up the Higurashi anime, which marked a bit of a turning point in the anime scene. It had a very unique mixture of cute moe girls and gore. While there were violent animes before, they usually had a very different, darker style - for example Hellsing or Claymore comes to mind. Higurashi made that unusual combi working with a very solid plot and it left a lasting impression due to its gory scenes being particular shocking because of they involved cute moe girls. Over the years, this inspired various other animes to use a similar formula. Good follow-up's were Puella Magi Madoka Magica, less because of its mostly minor gore and more because of its dark themes. Unfortunately, there were also more than enough shows that tried to fake depth by adding gore and just delivering a rubbish plot. Typical indicators of those 'works' were sudden personality swaps that didn't make sense, ridiculous over-exaggerated hysteria and whining orgies from the protagonist that could last for minutes to 'emphasize' the grittiness and maturity of the plot. Furthermore, artificial stretching of the story to delay the revelation of its non-existence as far as possible to the end. And finally, an absolutely disappointing ending when it gets clear that the show had no substance at all. And Chaos;Child started to show similar signs. Very few revelations and too much slice of life, and so the story got slower and slower to the point of stagnation. A certain key issue involving Yui was probably the turning point. The story got frustrating because there was almost no progress and the villain seemed untouchable. To be fair, at that point the VN still had the potential to be very good. Unfortunately, after that the last third or so of the VN started and threw that at me: Oh! My! God! What was that?!? I think that was the biggest bogus plot I've seen in the last ten years. I'm still not sure how much of this stuff is actually supposed to be true because it was so buried in nonesense and ridiculum. Trying to go 'chuuni' with their silly swords towards the end certainly also wasn't the brightest idea. Heroines were also more or less dropped and not developed any further. Everything felt rather rushed, after the VN was incredible slow before that. I thought about playing the heroine routes and the true route, but after reading some comments and synopsis about them, it seems that I didn't even read the biggest bullshit yet. If it wouldn't be so ridiculous over-dramatized you could at least take it as goofy comedy. But the VN seems to honestly expect to take this nonesense serious. And what's the point with the sex-delusion system? It might have made sense for the protagonist in Chaos;Head who was a lot more broken - but here?! Overall, there's a rather good thread on Reddit that points out a lot of problems of the VN and I agree with most of them. No idea how it could get such a high rating on VNDB. This is light years away from both Stein's Gate and also Root Double with which it has strong similarities. Heroine ranking: Hinae > Mio > Nono = Serika ? Hana (It's hard to judge Hana since you don't get to know her very good in the common route) Final rating: 5.5/10 (Start: 8 Middle: 7 End: 2) I'm honestly kind of sad that the VN turned out that way - there was so much potential. I would have probably given already a high rating if they just made a somewhat 'normal' ending with more romance orientated routes and didn't try to go hyper extra special. I wonder if this was the fault of Umehara Eiji, the writer who wrote all the bad chapters at the end. He's the only one of the five writers with no previous experience - and it showed.

Really looking forward to this VN. Though, while there are certainly many VN's where I don't really care about the H-scenes, this is one where I actually do. I like the art and judging by the VN tags this is very ero heavy. I therefore wouldn't be amused if they'd only release an all ages version.

Lovely & Cation has two rather nice teacher heroines.

So that means, the heroine routes are overall just alternative bad endings?

Still reading Chaos;Child, but currently it's starting to frustrate me more and more to be honest. Mostly because the perpetrator is just so ridiculous powerful in comparison, that the conflict got so completely one sided that it's getting rather boring in consequence. It's like watching a Dota2 match from Evil Geniuses against an amateur team. While conflicts against overwhelming powerful sides aren't unusual, the good side usually has at least the advantage of being anonymous - like the rebels in Star Wars making hidden strikes against the mighty Empire. Stein's Gate was such a conflict where they had to fight a powerful organization from the shadows. And in most murder mystery VN's like Kara no Shojo, the perpetrator is even the haunted one who has to try to outsmart the police. But while the situation in Chaos;Child has similarities to KnS, the main characters are more like a bunch of lab rats trapped in a cage which are completely dependent on the arbitrariness of its owner. Personally, I prefer somewhat more balanced conflicts where both sides are trying to outsmart each other.

*Wrong thread*

This being one of my favorite untranslated VN's, I guess I can drop a few words about it. Unlike the anime, the VN isn't just a plain nukige, it's more of a very ero heavy mystery VN. Atmosphere and style has a more realistic western touch that is very similar to Innocent Grey's story VN's, and I'm pretty sure it was at least inspired by some of them. Especially Caucasus has some frapping similarities to it. Despite the similarities it's much less gory and it's usually they guys who die here and not the girls. Regarding the ero content, it's mostly 'vanilla in disguise' as I'd call it. That means the VN looks dark on the surface, but besides some rapy stuff in the bad ends it's pretty much just vanilla. There's no fetish stuff like in Lilith or Clock Up nukiges. This was actually the first VN I read in Japanese. It's therefore a while ago since I read it, so I don't remember all details anymore. But I try to summarize what I still know. I'll keep the rest in spoiler tags for obvious reasons. If you want to buy the game, you can probably get a download version from Getchu or another online shop for Japanese VN's. If you want a hard copy, the best way is probably to get it from Amazon.jp here (NSFW), new or used. If you have problems ordering directly, you can also create a ticket at J-List. If you give them the link, they can usually help you getting it - for a fee of course.

Awesome timing, I just started reading Chaos;Child via patch about a week ago. If I'd known that they'd release it on Steam now, I'd have waited. Though, judging by the picture here in the Steam screenshots, they didn't translate the names of the talking character, which is a bit disappointing to be honest. Anyway, I'll still buy it. Regarding Chaos;Head, I'm fine that I didn't read it (or to be precise, I dropped it early because of whiny Takumi). The protag in Chaos;Child isn't supposed to know what was behind those murders - only that they happened. So the immersion is bigger because no info is spoiled and the revelations will probably also turn out more interesting that way.

Finished Flowers -Le Volume sur Été- and just like the first one, it was a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I liked the whole mature style of the VN, both visually and writing-wise. On the other hand, this part probably had even less plot than the first one. It was pretty much pure slice of life through and through, and although Erika was an entertaining protagonist who fortunately didn't suffer from Suou's hetare complex, it still got a bit dull after a while. Chidori was an okay character, but I didn't really buy their relationship. I think Erika and Suou would have been a much better fitting couple - they would have complemented each others weaknesses much better. The Sasaki twins were adorable like always, and bitch queen Rikka was surpringly more bearable than last time. Not enough Yuzuriha for me though. Felt more like a fan disk overall, since most stuff like sprites and backgrounds was recycled from last part and the title only had about 40 CGs. They certainly didn't take a financial risk here. A real pain in the ass were the choices though. It had millions - no idea why! Most choices were of the sort: 1: Do something 2: Do the same thing just phrased a bit different Naturally, almost none of them seemed to have any influence on the story. The funny part was finiding the choices which actually DID. Except for some choices that caused an immediate bad ending, it was almost impossible to figure them out. And even then, at least the endings I got were just different in the last five minutes or so. Heroine ranking: Yuzuriha >> Sasaki twins > Nerine = Chidori > Erika > Suou >>> Rikka Final rating: 5.5/10 I would have given a 6.5, but I subtract half a grade for the plethora of bugs the title is suffering from, and another half grade for forcing me twice through a 40 minutes skipping session just to get another lousy 5 minute ending. I also started playing Sakura Sakura, which somehow constantly gives me a strong urge to hit several of its characters with a sharp and pointy item. Besides that, I also started Chaos;Child which seems to be much better so far than its predecessor Chaos;Head. A bit slow maybe, but the characters are likable with unique personalities and circumstances. And not to forget, the protagonist is much better written. They also got a rather good voice actor for him. Certainly a strong contender for VN of the year if it keeps that quality.

Liarsoft VN's might fit the bill since they are known for their poetic prose and their protagonists are usually more mature. Ourai no Gahkthun would be a good read, though Neon and Tesla share the protagonist role. Sekien no Inganock has a very good male protagonist, but the story is weaker and the visuals are rather dated.