ChaosRaven

I think the influence of the Baldr series is also extremely high, considering that none of their titles are translated yet. But despite that, they are always on the top of many most wanted lists. Grisaia and also Rewrite were released in a year when nothing else spectacular was translated, and so people had the time to give them their full attention. And the Kickstarter hype added to that. The title probably wouldn't get that much attention if it would have been released just now. So I think it wasn't just the *cough* 'overwhelming' quality of the title, but also the good timing of the release.

The second half of the post could have well been from me, the first half... not so much. I wouldn't bash Fate or Kanon. Even if it's true that Kanon's VN art sucks nowadays, but I really liked the anime. And bashing Key art while having an avatar of a character from one of the VN's with Key's most questionable art would be kind of bizarre even for me...

Hmm, while there are certainly VN's that exceeded my expectations, there aren't that much which I didn't want to play at all and then they were really blowing me away. I think the most prominent example in my case would be Kara no Shoujo. Initially I thought it would be some dark hentai guro crap like Maggot Baits, but thanks to some reviews and clarifying forum comments I got curious and tried the demo. I was literally glued to the screen - the VN turned out to be a very mature and serious work with a brilliant story and oozing atmosphere from every pore. Overdrive's Edelweiss was also much better than expected and Suika A.S. surprised me with one of the most beautiful endings ever. Nothing reaches the big contrast of initial expectation and actual experience like Kara no Shoujo though.

I've yet to understand why the mosaic sizes in various adult media of Japan are different anyway. It's certainly not favorable for the sales if bigger mosaics are used, so why are they used in the first place if smaller ones are legal too? I would have thought that there's some kind of 'ISO norm' for Japanese mosaics that precisely defines size, shape and usage. But maybe it's a Japanese 'thing' and everyone has to pay a 'Naughty fee' if they want to use smaller mosaics. Or they get special patriotism points if they use bigger mosaics with extra points if they are even in the shape of Japanese national flags, and if they reached a certain point value they get a dakimakura of their prime minister.

Mosaics are great and should also be used for English VN's, just must bigger and also for the breasts!

Nope, I've continued some more since then and now I'm almost finished with route B. Unfortunately, it didn't really improve in comparison to route A even if the style is very different.

Well, mine is from Ai from Tick Tack. She's my top waifu. It was love on first sight when I saw her on MangaGamer's preview images years ago, and I knew: She's the one! Since then I change my avatar once per year to another image of her. This thread reminded me that I hadn't done that for this year yet, so I caught up on that now.

VNDB claims it's the other way round and Tomoya is the protag and Tomoyo the girl.

Wasn't the protagonist of Clannad supposed to be a delinquent? I think that was even an important point in some story arcs, like in Tomoyo's because she was school president and not supposed to hang around with the likes of him. Though he's certainly more of a 'soft-delinquent'. Too bad there's no VN for the School Rumble anime. That delinquent protag was real fun.

I guess you mean Shin Koihime † Musou -Kakumei-, however they've already sold the predecessor Shin Koihime † Eiyuutan in three split parts, so they've done that before. Though there's coming out the combi package Shin Koihime † Eiyuutan 123 plus next month which contains all three parts.

Definitely looking forward to this one, although I'm a bit curious if Purple Software will try to 'over-compensate' the lack of H-scenes in Chrono Clock with this one. Well, at least it's not tagged as nukige yet. But there are really coming a lot of top titles out in the next months. The year looked pretty lame so far, but maybe the tide will turn now.

Until mid game I had several elemental decks too, but after that I had to focus on one deck since I simply hadn't enough crystals left to level up all my high tier creatures beyond level 25. Not even all of my green dragons were level 50 at the end. Unfortunately, I had to stick to rather basic strategies (mainly T4 nukes) since I couldn't hook the card descriptions. If there wasn't a big number indicating huuuge damage, it wasn't easy to figure out the card effect.

Still, I don't think the solution is that moege readers suddenly start reading just nukiges instead. The signs for the industry would be... fatal. At least I wouldn't call the majority of VN's turning from moeges to nukiges an improvement.

While I'm somewhat slow with English VN's, at least I seem to be able to finish some Japanese stuff lately. I've finished the last route I wanted to play in Akagoei with the one from Aya Nikaidou. Well, technically it 'should' have been her route, but in reality it somehow turned out more like one for her bodyguard Takanori. The majority of the route did consist of Kaito and Takanori arguing with each other like two immature teenagers. It was mostly comedy, but in all honesty those two guys were so obsessed with teasing each other that I wouldn't have been surprised anymore if the route would have turned BL on they way. Aya unfortunately got the short end of the stick, ending up more as a side character with some tagged on H-scenes. And that's a bit of a shame since I really liked her as a character. Overall, the VN probably did a decent job in the comedy department, but in terms of story or romance it falls apart. Reika probably had the only route where the story had some substance, but none of them provided a good romance. I unfortunately couldn't appreciate it as much because there was a lot of word play involved which all too often exceeded my Japanese language skills. So I'm certainly to blame here too. I skipped Tsuki's and *spoilers* routes despite liking them because Tsuki was too loli and *spoiler* still looked a bit too *spoiler* for me. Heroine rankings: Aya > Moe > *spoiler* > Tsuki > Tae > Reika. Final rating: 6.5/10 (Though I would have probably rated it higher in English) I've also finished Verethragna about 2 weeks ago. Well, it involved lots of skipping of pointless character events, and I don't think I would have finished it if I wouldn't have fallen into a short card game addiction which ended up in me installing Spellweaver and Magic - Duels on Steam. While the card game in Verethragna might not be the most complex one, it's fast and addictive, has good card art and some additionally gimmicks in the meta game like card leveling. It also isn't too hard to figure out an effective strategy. Usually, I used two armour breakers to make way and then used a mana generation card in combination with a nuke from a T4 monster to kill the leader with one hit. If you focus on just one leader card + crew there shouldn't even be much grinding involved. It was a bit more in my case since I leveled both Kisskill and Leah and a bunch of creatures up to high levels. Leah in particular was brutal since she had -1 deploy cost for each creature and I could run around with three green dragons. The only situation where I really had to grind a while was the end boss. Unfortunately, the rest of the game wasn't as great as the card game. The story about the 'living cards' from the parallel dimension had potential, but trying to force a dozen heroines into one route couldn't end well. About 2/3 of the heroines only acted as plain H-scene deliverers and shouldn't have been heroines at all. It might have still been kind of okay if you would have at least been allowed to just pick the ones you're interested in, but noooooo you had to 'do' them all. They should have at least focused on the card heroines. Having the protagonist 'sliming' himself through the school girls was just *ugh*. And there was so much potential. Having heroines as leader cards was literally screaming for heroine routes as a way to have replays with different leader and creature card combinations. But unfortunately Astronauts doesn't seem to understand the simple concept of a heroine route. Even worse, I think I got about 60% of the character events AFTER I had beaten the final end boss. What the hell were they thinking?! Still, the card game was fun, but I think I'm slowly giving up my hopes to get a (worthy) successor for Kiriya Shimai from them. Heroine rankings: Leah > Kisskill > Suzuna > Satis > don't care. Final rating: 7/10 (Mostly for the card game, the rest was barely a 6/10) And finally, for my moege needs I've finished two left-over routes from Walkure Romanze Retell 1 & 2. Noel's in Retell 1 was better than expected while Akane's in Retell 2 was 'unusual' to say the least. I was almost falling from the chair when her route suddenly went harem. Usually, Walkure Romanze is strictly one girl. Final rating: 7.5/10 Anyway, since I've now finished all that left-over stuff, I've now time for Ikusa Megami and Seikishi Melty ☆ Lovers.

Eh, what?! You're criticizing that people like romance with ero because those titles might not be the deepest ones, and then advice them to play simple nukiges without ANY personality at all instead? You should also keep in mind that your perspecitive is different from the typical English VN reader simply because you can read Japanese and freely choose from all the VN's the Japanese market has to offer. The typical moege everyone likes to bash might be the most common release in Japan, but that isn't the case in the west. The majority of VN's we get are story VN's and then some nukiges from time to time. Moeges usually have the lowest priority - we get maybe ~2 bigger ones per year. And half of those are even from fan translations, otherwise it would be just the one MangaGamer release per year. And the released nukiges are either extreme fetish ones like Starless, all ages 'Steam-nukiges' like many Sakura titles or shovelware of the lowest quality. I think the only major developer of story VN's who isn't active in the west is actually Light. The other ones like Liar-Soft, Nitroplus, Innocent Grey, AkabeiSoft2 and a bunch of indie ones - we get them all. And how may moege developers are active in the west, maybe 5-10 %? That's not to say I wouldn't understand your situation, since you're more or less buried in generic moeges every month. But the situation is simply different for most English VN readers since the ratio of moege to story VN releases is almost reversed. And what else can people use for judging a new VN than art and a small synopsis which says almost nothing in case of a moege anyway, since ratings are just slowly dribbling in and reviews don't exist yet. There's also something that's bugging me for some time now. And that's the assumption that story VN's with a decent plot 'automatically' also have good romance and characters with great personality in it. And that's unfortunately not the case - AT ALL. Let's have a look at Innocent Grey's take on romance: Boy meets girl he hardly knows or just has a working relationship with. Girl says "Hey, wunna ****?", boy answers "Yeah, let's ****!" followed by an H-scene. That's Innocent Grey and romance in a nutshell. Now let's take Tokyo Babel and see how it approaches a grim apocalyptic setting where humanity, angels and demons got almost extinct in several gruesome massacres: Let's build a high school for people who are already thousands of years old => slap stick festival => brutal murders followed by battle for life and death => slap stick festival => impaled victims burning in hellfire and screaming in agony => slap stick festival. Yeah, it does have some good scenes and interesting ideas, but is that really supposed to be admirable 'character building' with the only person that seems to somehow reflect the situation being the protagonist? And don't get me started with the character simpletons in Root Double - it's essentially a kids novel.

I didn't play the title myself yet, but there's a discussion thread about it that might be able to answer your questions.

Too many to count...

I somehow didn't understand why in some categories the lowest number was the highest rating, and in others it was the exact opposite and the highest number was the highest rating. I mean, couldn't they just decide for one rating scale?! Honestly, it they would have also had a field 'What is Sekai Project bad at?', I would have probably entered 'Surveys'...

Kind of expected. The title caught my eyes some time ago because it had some very nice art. But I felt rather bad vibes coming from it from the start. The title, some screenshots - it was literally screaming dark fetish rape. What a waste of good art.

Ugh, couldn't they have made the survey a bit shorter?! It took forever to finish it.

The problem isn't that there is humour, but the 'type' of humour. Even the Kara no Shoujo series has humour, just more composed and cynical. I don't think 'silly school girl' humour fits to a demon or angel who faced countless atrocities over time.

Now that you mention it... yeah I guess I could have known that. But I still like my own notations more!

Well, I guess in this case it's most likely Bunny Black 3. Makes sense to complete the trilogy. He seems to like the franchise otherwise he would hardly have translated the first two parts. Not sure what else he might translate. He seems to stick to gameplay titles and there aren't that much quality titles besides Eushully and Alice Soft. He won't do Alice Soft except it's for MangaGamer and I'm not sure if he's a big fan of Debonosu, NineTail or Astronauts. Though the Sengoku Hime titles from Gesen 18 don't look so bad even if nobody seems to talk about them. I still wouldn't rule out an Eushully title. The incident was years ago, and Eushully's reaction was just typical Japanese VN developer stubborness - not really worth to hold a personal grudge over years.

I think I have the worst behind me. They noticed some supposed terrorist activity and tempo is increasing now.

Yeah, that's why I tagged it 'Expandable' since it's apparently just extra information not essentially required for the story. Well, I thought they named it route E since it comes after the regular 4 episodes. Not that it would be of any importance...