ChaosRaven

How many of their Kickstarters actually have failed? The only one I can remember is the one for this weird... magical boy trap yaoi... whatever thing?! Though I don't really follow all of their smaller Kickstarter projects. I completely missed the one for Fault - Milestone One and just found out that it had one after I bought the title on Steam. So it's definitely possible that I missed some of their failed Kickstarters.

...no Uta. Oh wait!

Well, Sekai Project was pretty successful with their Kickstarters so far, even if the one for Root Double was a bit rough. And the same can't exactly be said for the Kickstarter campaigns of a certain other company *cough*ChuSinGura*cough*Beastmaster and Prince*cough*. And Oretsuba and Tsuriotsu at least have a good enough reputation to attract a good amount of backers.

In a way I'm relieved that they at least made a clean cut now. So potential fan translaters at least won't keep away from their titles anymore, just because they respect a partnership that was actually long gone. And maybe that makes them an interesting partner for Sekai Project now. I would gladly back a Kickstarter if it would be for Oretsuba or Tsuriotsu.

Well, it's anime Boston so I don't really expect any big announcements yet. So it'll most likely smaller titles like short doujin and nukiges from MangaGamer and maybe some OELVN and 'Steam-nukiges' (aka Sakura titles) from Sekai Project. But an announcement of an official release of a fan translated title like Sharin no Kuni is certainly also within the realms of possibility.

Hmm, while I don't think that the religious background will give me any sleepless nights, the lack of character focus or attractive (=interesting?) heroines might get a problem for me. It better have a damn good story to make up for that. I wasn't exactly blown away by Ayakashibito. The common route was very promising, but the actual routes were pretty lackluster. The only route that was kind of okay was Kaoru's, and even that was more because Kotarou was coolness incarnate than anything else.

I think it only makes sense in combination with the Shuffle hard copy since it's a continuation of Nerine's story. If you like it depends mainly on if you can enjoy a simple moege. Tick Tack itself has a somehow interesting time travel back-consequence story which I actually like more than the overused generic time loop. But it isn't developed enough to buy it for that reason.

Yes, that sounds like a very likely reason. So they'll probably stop selling those titles in a few years too. Well, I already have my precious Tick Tack hardcopy so I'll probably survive it...

So they have to take down Shuffle but they are still allowed to sell Tick Tack and Really Really?! That's really odd. Both titles are fairly old and everyone who wanted to read them probably has done that already and MangaGamer themselves already made their money with it. So it isn't that much of a loss. The real problem with it is like already mentioned, that the chance to get their newer much higher rated titles pretty much dropped to zero. So I guess MoonStone is MG's new Navel now, just with guaranteed ensurance for ongoing mediocrity.

I usually try to read one Japanese and one English VN at the same time. Though currently, I'm reading just two Japanese VN's (Akagoei + Lovely & Cation) since I've finished Beat Blades Haruka. Though I'll probably start with Tokyo Babel and/or Root Double as soon as they get released.

First, I didn't play so much VN's with gameplay yet and this one was simply still on the okayish side compared to the rest of the bunch. That hardly makes it one of my favorite VN's. And comedy rape is probably not the perfect word, calling it soft-rape would probably more accurate. And now, let's consider the situation. The oh so evil demon lord is constantly attacked in his dungeon by the heroines who all intend to kill him. And what did he do? Instead of just killing them off what pretty much every human castle owner in the middle ages would have done, and what would also have been fully justified, he instead gives them just a hot round of sex where he even made sure with thorough foreplay that they are also enjoying themselves - and then just let them go. And the girls are so 'scared' of him after that, that they return almost immediately just to get another round of sex. And after several times he just asks if they don't just wanna join his harem to make things easier. So they want to kill him and he just wants some good old fun in return. Sounds like a pretty nice guy to me. A human castle lord in the middle ages would have just tortured and killed them instead and put their head on a pole as a lesson for others. And those were the 'good' guys. And I'm certainly not a Rance expert, but doesn't he actually conquer the territories of the girls with the intention to rape them?! Well, the demon lord in Demonion actually acts in self defense. So this title is definitely miles away from something like a Black Lilith rape nukige. It's not even fetish heavy, most scenes are more on the vanilla side as long as you don't play the optional scenes. And the girls are enjoying it after some initial resistance. So yeah, for a 'rape-nukige' I definitely consider it a light hearted version of it.

I honestly find this comment more disturbing than the whole 'Angelic Howl' arc...

You're kidding, right?!

It may sound like that but it isn't. I was able to finish the 'content' for all girls in one play-through. And this play-through for ALL girls was probably still faster than one play-through of Aselia for ONE girl which I didn't even finish because it was too grindy. The problem was that there was too much H-content instead of story, the gameplay parts were okay. But there was certainly more story there than in Haruka. And I certainly don't have to explain you the difference between comedy rape and serious rape. I'm still not a big friend of it but the VN was far from serious and not all scenes were rape either. The only true villainous scenes where you get the extra monsters were optional and I didn't play those.

Of course, it's pretty much the prologue - or the pre-prologue. Looking back, I think it had the most grim murder scene of KnS2.

I list my top three gameplay VN's according to how much I liked them and not ranked by the quality of its gameplay system. 1.) Koihime Musou One of the first VN's I played but it's still one of my absolute favorites. The gameplay parts are rather light though - it's certainly not a gameplay VN. But the short battle sections were still a nice distraction. 2.) Kamidori Alchemy Meister Certainly the best gameplay VN I've played so far and I really liked the setting and the characters (mainly Serawi). My main gripes with it was that it was rather grindy and therefore very time consuming. 3.) Demonion I played that mainly because of M&M's art, but the dungeon keeper gameplay was pretty fun. It had two gameplay modes, a tower defense part for the dungeon defense and an attack mode to conquer territories. I liked that they didn't make a grinding game out of it and the gameplay parts were short enough that they didn't completely dominate the story sections. Though the biggest problem of the title were the lack of story and character development - it's still a nukige at heart. Fortunately, the rapy parts weren't that much of an issue since the VN was rather light hearted.

I share a lot of your gripes with the VN, and I'd recommend you to play Amanes route which has a rather long back story part called 'Angelic howl'. This story section about Yuuji's sister Kazuki and Amane is the by far best part of the VN. It's very serious, shocking and touching, and Kazuki is a fantastic character. The only other routes I played were Sachi's and Yuminko's. From those Yumiko's route was horrible and Sachi's was mostly boring and the ending was idiotic beyond believe. I didn't like Michiru and Machika enough to play their routes, but at least Makina's route is supposed to be almost as good as Angelic Howl because it was written by the same writer.

Okay, I finally finished it, or at least one play-through which is certainly enough for me. But man, that was that dull - its only saving grace is probably the gameplay part which was surprisingly addictive and fun. It wouldn't be enough to motivate me for another play-through, but for the first one it was entertaining enough. I tried to go for Subaru first, which unfortunateley failed since she turned out more as a side character than a full heroine who only joins the team much later on. So I was more or less stuck with Haruka. Narika was pretty much out of discussion since I've probably never seen a girl that looked less like a ninja girl than her. She also had such a high pitched voice that I was almost relieved when she didn't participate in conversations and I wasn't forced to keep my drinking glasses away from the speakers out of fear they might burst. However, for better or worse conversations outside H-scenes were a rarity anyway. That's not to say that the other heroines would have been much better, they were just less annoying. Haruka pretty much had no personality at all and Subaru who at least had the potential for a cool ninja girl was left just as a mere side character. I was actually surprised that a Subaru route was unlocked after my play-through with Haruka. Though considering that Haruka's route more or less only consisted of a few more H-scenes and maybe half a page more additional text, that's certainly nothing special. Except that you have to beat the final opponent with your chosen girl which was a very bad surprise for me since my far strongest character was Subaru and not Haruka. There's also little to no story, since the game mainly consists of the gameplay parts and picking H-scenes. The text and dialogue inbetween is usually just repeated over and over again with the exception of some rare key scenes. And even the H-scenes were overall more tedious and boring than anything else. That's not to say they were badly drawn - considering their age they were fine for the most part even if I did hate the protagonist shadow obscuring the girls. The main problem was that they lacked a decent setup that gets you in the mood. They were just training after all, a mechanical act like making your daily coffee for breakfast or bringing out the garbage, nothing more. No tension or emotional bond to make them more engaging. And if that wouldn't be enough already, you have to play every H-scene three times (!!!) to get the full version of it. I've also seen repeated H-scenes beyond that, so the total amount of unique H-scenes isn't really that high, especially considering that there are only 2,5 heroines. And if you don't play the evil route you can just cut them in half. The overall production values were more on the average side. The title has only partial voice acting and the heroines just 1 - 2 different body sprites. For the most part I was just looking at a few 'hovering' heads talking with each other. Having just played a Yuzusoft title with a highly dynamic sprite and facial expression system, this was almost a slap in the face. On the other hand, most side characters were drawn so I at least didn't have to endure exciting conversations with air, void and emptyness. Despite my not exactly glowing review, I wouldn't go so far to call it a bad title. While it's certainly light years away from something like Kamidori, I'd say it's at least comparable to the Raidy titles quality wise. It's still a lot better than what MangaGamer and Jast were churning out in their cheap nukige days and it's certainly fairly priced compared to what they charge for their cheap nukiges from Softhouse Seal & Co. Overall, I'd rate it a subjective 6.0, but since I only played the good route I grant it a more objective 6.5 since it also offers an evil route I didn't play. This getting a high rating on EGS can probably only explained with the time it was released. Those days, the production values were probably a lot higher in comparion to the average VN than today where it would probably hardly reach a 60 on EGS anymore. So time definitely matters for ratings, especially for those that just rely on artistic and technical merits instead of story and writing.

I hope it didn't get that size just because all the images are saved as uncompressed bitmap files and the sounds files in uncompressed WAV format. Looking forward to the title though I'll keep my expectations within reasonable limits. Ratings are solid but nothing to rave about either, at least for a story title.

Well, Koihime Musou is the ultimate harem VN. It has at least two twin sub stories with Renfa and her sister Shaoren and Daikyou and Shoukyou although the latter are a bit... peculiar. And those are just the twin harem stories, there are even more with friends, master-servant, etc.

This was actually irritating me a bit in Conjuerors VN contest. I had the impression that many voters thought that Hatsusaku is just a light hearted moege. But most comments I've seen from people who actually read it implied more that it's a more sophisticated and mentally exhausting VN, maybe even comparable to the true route of ef. You hardly need a 'recovery VN' for a feel good moege.

Especially in the anime... I'd also add Elis from Canvas 2, Nemu from Da Capo and Michika from Imopara and Kagome from Comyu. Rise and Chiho from Princess Evangile could also fit the bill - they are at least fighting over the protagonist. And considering that Ai from Tick Tack goes full netori at a certain point I'd also include her. In general, imouto and onee-chan characters tend to be very attached to the protagonist, although I wouldn't call all of them necessarily possessive because of that.

Translation Aggregator can work quite decently in combination with Atlas if you know how to setup a title properly, as long as the title doesn't use too difficult Japanese. One of the biggest problems for the machine translators are usually the names, because those are often not clearly distinguishable from normal words. Especially my personal favorites - one-kanji names like 歩 (Ayumu) from Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi which is used in the very common word 歩くfor walk. You really don't wanna know what fairy tales Atlas can create out of sentences with this name... However, you can increase the translation accuracy quite a bit by preparing a name table for Translation Aggregator. That's usually the first thing I do before I start a new Japanese VN. It's also very helpful for weird katakana constructs if the VN is written in extra-cool Japanese where every second word is an English word written in katakana. The table below is an example of a name table I used when playing Hoshizora e Kakaru Hashi. And if you still don't understand a sentence you use JParser to look up the word. And the more you read the easier it will get. Though I'm currently using Chiitrans myself where I add the names on the fly because I don't get the text dropping problems between ITH and TA under control.

I think that's the first time I've seen someone keeping track over his overall VN rating with an Excel sheet. You're sure the final rating is 7,87326732673267 and not 7,87326732673266? It looks a bit overrated in the 14th decimal place.

A good translation should be a matter of course for a professional company and not something I should have to 'request' in a priority list. Just like a computer game should be released in a bug free state without having to request that in particular. Naturally, reality is different and those things unfortunately happen far too often, but I'm still too stubborn to request something that should be a given.