ChaosRaven

I'm actually quite interested in Pygmalion. In comparison to Tokyo Babel it seems to be more mystery than action and I usually prefer mystery, at least if it comes to VN's. I'm also kind of relieved that it's not tagged as comedy, since Tokyo Babel's indecisiveness if it wants to be a comedy VN or an utsuge was a bit too much for me and made it hard to take the the VN seriously. Especially the high school in limbo... Sure, there's no guarantee that Pygmalion will be better, but I'm at least willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And not to forget, there's also Yang Li-Ling, the cool Chinese chick I'm heavily interested in since I saw her the first time. A heroine that is actually older than 20 - so rare that it's hard to believe that it's even a Japanese VN.

It's really worth a read. It's hard to believe what personal sacrifices Kouryuu had to make to get this project done. Although he dropped some hints from time to time that this project was demanding a lot from him, I wasn't really aware of the extent of it. I hope the title sells well, because it might also strongly influence MangaGamer's future willingness to take on such a big project again. And I REALLY want to see another Koihime title from them some day, and those are all super long.

This goes deeper than just a mere editing pass. The common route is more about 'friendship comedy' and the individual routes more about 'romance comedy'. And if it comes to Yuzusoft's comedy styles, I like the former but the latter not so much. It's more a matter of taste. I had similar issues with Noble Works. I'm also not the biggest comedy fan anyway, and it therefore speaks for Yuzusoft's writing quality that I can still appreciate it to a certain degree.

To add an opinion of someone who isn't exactly a pro-reader and has to heavily rely on a text hooker, I usually switch between thorough but exhausting and sloppy but relaxing reading. I try to reserve the thorough reading more for the interesting scenes I like, while I switch to more sloppy reading for uninteresting parts or if I get too exhausted. My knowledge of the grammar is so so and I only know the most basic kanji, so there's no chance for me to read without a text hooker, but I can at least read very simple sentences without too much problems.

So I finished Dracu-Riot! now, or to be more precise Rio's and Miu's routes. Originally, I planned to at least play Nicola's and maybe even Elina's routes too, but decided against it at the end. Dracu Riot has a great prologue, a funny and entertaining common route, but somehow after that, as soon as the individual routes start, it stops being good. And there are several reasons for that. First, I had the impression that they pretty much run out of budget when they finished the common route since almost nothing new was drawn anymore except for the H-scenes. You can count the number of event CG's for each route more or less on one hand and even major characters aren't drawn anymore. I appreciate Yuzusoft's attempt to add an interesting story, but it's not particularly convincing if they abbandon it half-way and don't even give a rats-ass about it anymore. They kept a good balance until the common route ends, but after that... ugh! The second major problem is that the romance scenes and the H-scenes in particular are akward at best and cringeworthy at worst. Yuzusoft's biggest strength is the comedic interaction between the characters, but the actual routes focus more on rather unconvincing romance scenes and a half assed story instead of that. It was a real chore to go through it. Though partly that's also a general problem of comedy VN's. Good romance requires a certain amount intensity and sincerity, which comedy VN's usually lack. The VN is also a bit too 'light' for a vampire VN. The characters are far too over-cutified for vampires and the whole theme is more about comedic detective work than vampires anyway. Dracu-Riot might be a good comedy VN, but it's certainly not a good vampire VN. And considering how the overall quality drops in the individual routes, I would also call the story barebones at best. That's not to say they wouldn't have had have some funny ideas. I'm still awed that one of Dracu-Riot's 'greatest' vampire strengths is that they can drink booze with 100% alcohol without dying. On the other hand, where's the fun if you don't even get drunk from it... Overall, it was still a solid read thanks to the great start, the entertaining common route, the good comedy and not to forget, Yuzusoft's great sprite dynamics which are almost unrivaled in the business. But yeah, two routes were enough for me. Heroine rankings: Miu > Nicola > Elina > Mera > Rio Overall rating: 7 / 10

Hmm, I think I stick to titles I've already read in Japanese and want to get translated, or titles I'm interested in from companies I've at least read one other title I liked. Before I request more titles from the likes of Light, Third Eye, Purple Software, etc. I first want to know if they can deliver with the titles that are already in translation. Anyway, in no particular order: 1.) Unionism Quartet (I could live without A3) 2.) Walkure Romanze (and More & More) 3.) Shin Koihime † Eiyuutan (and upcoming Kakumei) 4.) Ikusa Megami Verita (or any other Eushully title) 5.) Caucasus ~Nanatsuki no Nie~ (Still from the times when IG titles were good) 6.) Lovely & Cation (Whole series: 1, 2 and upcoming Nizuma) 7.) Tsuki ni Yorisou Otome no Sahou (Really want to know if Luna deserves winning the Getchu character award three years in a row) 8.) Komorebi no Nostalgica (Somehow this one interests me even more than Otoboku 2) 9.) Aiyoku no Eustia (One of the rare highly rated fantasy titles without gameplay) 10.) Kiriya Hakushakuke no Roku Shimai (Hottest vampire chicks ever...)

Actually, it already looks very 'databasey' to me. I mean I can already go back and browse all titles from 2010. As a pure news site I think Omochikaeri has more charm since they have nice blog articles where they bash comment all the individual releases. But this site allows me to browse all the titles of a particular year seeing the cover image, short info and a small description side by side. VNDB is a great database, but it's just horrible for browsing since you just get a huge list of titles and have to click each entry individually to get some info about it. It's great for search and for linking, but not really suited for relaxed browsing for an interesting title.

I think it's great if - like Toranth mentioned - this is kept up to date. There's the cover, a short description and links to all relevant sites. Though, I'd have some suggestions for improvement: First, the cover images are a bit small, and since those are usually supposed to grab your interest they should be bigger i think. Second, the EGS links use IP-blocked links which isn't useful for a non-Japanese audience. Conjueror posted an EGS link which isn't IP blocked some time ago: http://egs.omaera.org/~ap2/ero/toukei_kaiseki/. I think it would be better to use this one. (Guess that's what Sana is indicating they'll fix...) It also lacks a search and a various filters like by year, month, language, etc. But the yearly top 100 are nice.

Interesting way to display VN's in full screen. I personally prefer to use basic DPI scaling of Windows 10 to increase the Window sizes of VN's that don't allow free resizing by default. The technically 'outdated' 4:3 VN's are actually great for that since I can display them pretty much full screen with Chiitrans on the left side of it. In addition, I set the text box transparency to 100% since I read the text in Chiitrans anyway, and therefore get a VN window which isn't cropped by the text box anymore. That means I get more image glory than a native reader har har... But for 16 : 9 VN's it might be worth a try since I can't display them full screen because I need some space for the Chiitrans window.

Yeah, I hear this utopic bla bla for decades now, but in reality relatively little happens. I start to believe if I see this 'giant galactic space station'. I wish the involved scientists the best of luck to solve the countless problems like gravity, lack of oxygen, huge traveling distance and the enormous costs that come with it. May their rocket don't go boooom like others before. Currently I think we've much more important problems like the refugee crisis, the middle east sinking to chaos, financial crisis, etc. therefore I hope they waste as little resources as possible in this nonesense. The only thing we need are satellites, because those are actually useful.

The EU are at least smart enough to don't spend an enormous amount of money just to land on a huge worthless piece of dirt. We're not in the 1950s / 1960s anymore when this kind of waste of resources was considered 'cool'.

Oops, I must have missed that. Wouldn't have expected that Eden got 2nd place without Steam.

Not sure about that. Last year they didn't have a separate top ten list for the Steam titles yet, and I don't think Eden would have gotten second place without its Steam sales. Yurirei was most likely their bestseller because of its glorious free "first sex game on Steam" marketing campaign on every game site. And Ozmafia is also known to have sold extremely well. So in a real top ten list it would have been probably 5th I guess.

That's unfortunate since it now makes it very hard to compare sales of Steam titles with non-Steam titles. It wouldn't bet on that. Steam reports about 2016 were indicating that despite an enormous increase in released titles on Steam in 2016, the overall revenue almost stayed the same. Which means that the individual titles sold less on average. For example, apparently Tokyo Babel didn't sell well, but it got 5th place in the Steam rankings. Does that mean that Steam sales were overall bad, or was ist just 'pre-emptive whining' directly after TB release since Steam titles usually have long tails? What makes it even more difficult is that those titles have split releases on MG's own site and Steam. So it's just a given that they stand no chance in MG's home rankings against the adult-only non-Steam titles. I wish they would just make a full list with all titles regardless if Steam or not. It's just hard to compare those titles the way it is now.

MangaGamer finally posted their year 2016 review with several top ten lists. In short: Pretty much all their older big nukiges made it back to the top ten, with ImoPara leading the way. Only the new nukiges Beat Blades Haruka and Funbag Fatasy could fend off their dominance. Rance going strong as expected and Princess Evangile also made a return. No story titles in sight though... . Not really shocked about that anymore - it's every year the same. Although Eden got a top three ranking if I rememer right. I'm not really sure if Steam sales are included or not though since Steam sales got their own list. Not much to say here... Several titles like Eden celebrating a comeback and Kindred Spirits and Ozmafia leading the pack. Would be interesting to know how big Steam sales are in comparison to sales on their own site.

Adding those two groups sounds like a great idea. Meanwhile at VNDB... Decay seems to fight for the splitting of the Majikoi A titles. lol

Yes, since you've used VNDB for the top ten, it would have probably been best to stick to that rating for choosing the other titles. It just looks weird if you exclude some titles because of low VNDB ratings but leave oddities like Memory's Dogma in. Though the popularity of a title is not only measured by the height of the rating but also the vote count. I know for a fact that some people prefer to not vote for a title instead of just giving it a low rating. So having a high vote count is usually a plus. For example, you also didn't include Koiken Otome because it just got a rating of 7.03, but it got more than 600 votes. In comparison, the top rated VN Fata Morgana just got 371 votes. So technically, the fairest rating would probably the bayesian one from VNDB. But well, even that 's problematic because it penalizes titles released at the end of the year... Anyway, I'm aware that this is just a fun contest, so don't take my criticism too seriously.

I'm not really angry but I think if you want to hold a 'public contest' you should leave it to the public what they like most and not just manipulate the available choices so that the end result fits your liking. You've 16 titles in your contest and you just admtted that 8 of them were just included because of personal preference while you intentionally ommited some titles that might have a significant impact on the contest. Your contest last year got a lot of attention, so this one might too. And as such it might influence common opinion. And the possible consequence might be that people will argue that title X wasn't popular because it didn't appear in your contest while title Y might gain more attention than it deserves. That wouldn't be a problem if it would be seen as just your personal favorite list, but it would be if the list gets treated as the 'common unbiased' opinion of the VN community. If you're actively manipulating that list in such a way it's simply not fair play anymore. I wouldn't mind if it would just be a few titles, but we're talking about half of the titles that were chosen for the contest. And I do think that's valid criticism and not just me being a bit grumpy.

While I can understand Enigma deserving a bit more attention, I fail to see why that should apply to Myth which just has a lousy 7.23 with 62 votes on VNDB. It would be more flop of the year candidate. I guess that's just 'MangaGamer bias' here. Excluding a title because it 'might win' is pretty odd. Especially since it's popularity is hardly comparable to Fate/Stay Night which has several hyper popular anime series and is sitting comfortably at the top of the VNDB ratings (highest vote count with top rating). Last years avalanche of TM fans was caused by anime fans which hijacked your contest. Nekopara doesn't have an anime (yet) so a similar incident is hardly to happen, especially since the vote count on VNDB also isn't all too high. In contrast to Majikoi A or World End Economica it's also listed as a separate title so it should be treated as such. Bunny Black 2 has a rating of 7.73 with 425 votes which is both more AND higher than several other of your titles. For example World End Econonmica or Harmonia have both less votes and a lower rating. And Harmonia can hardly be called a decent representative of a Key nakige since it's neither good nor long enough. And wouldn't there also be the risk of Key fans swarming the contest? I really don't get your reasoning here. You're excluding a nukige which is universally praised for it's good story and spawned a gazillion successors? Isn't that something praiseworthy? And what is Rance making in your contest then which is mostly gameplay and H-scenes if nukige stories don't count? Especially since the Rance fan base can also be scary. And including Chusingura which just bombards you with fan service non-stop would be also a bit questionable then. And I don't really want to comment the inclusion of Memory's Dogma with it's 6.8 rating and 62 votes. Honestly, I don't know why you're holding a 'public contest' if you just don't care about public opinion anyway and just manipulate the included titles as you please. I'm fine with using VNDB to restrict titles, but you make so many exceptions to either include or exclude titles you like or dislike, that the contest is so oozing with bias that it can hardly called a 'public and objective' contest anymore. Why don't you just name your personal favorites for this year and be fine with it?

Well, a Happy New Year to you all! Unfortuntely, I had to 'celebrate' New Year's Eve with a little stomach flu, so at least the end of the year could have been better.

ditto

I think I've played enough VN's to say that the problem of heroines that aren't exactly the brightest lights and are not taken serious isn't just a phenomenon exclusive to cat girls...

Well, it's about time they release it. I was waiting quite a long time for it. Although my enthusiasm for it suffered a bit over time to be honest. Hope the title can restore my faith. It's a bit irritating that Dal Segno's translation is already finished too, although it was just announced this year. Feels a bit like its translation time in months equals Da Capo 3's translation time in years.

I know what you mean. It actually lost a lot of steam after the stellar beginning and went back to standard moege territory for the most part. It's still a good moege though, but I also feel a bit saturated of it after being literally bombarded with it by Yoakena, Mirai Nostalgia and UQ A3. And Hanachirasi wasn't really good enough for a worthy distraction. 11 Eyes seems to offer a more interesting experience, so maybe I start reading it in sync with Dracu Riot. I wouldn't call it 'better' than Dracu Riot though, it's simply a different kind of VN I think.

I heard good things about 11 Eyes and the story sounds interesting so I'll at least give it a try sometime. Since most English VN's I was waiting for this year like DC3 or Pygmalion got delayed until next year, I might pick it up when I'm finished with Dracu Riot.