Okarin

I know that we, as males, tend to focus on the waifus (if you're a girl and reading this, I'm afraid this is not aimed at you), and even though we are dudes, often we put on waifu avatars. I'm on the opposite team, the team where we like to be acknowledged as males (not in a macho way, only for what it's worth), and I tend to put male character avatars. Because, you know, moe girls in avatars can be deceiving. Male leads I really liked include: - Okabe Rintaro (of course, he's probably one of the most influential male characters in Japanese media) - Deardrops' Shouichi - Deardrops' Samejima (a secondary character but I liked him) - Noragami's Yato (my current avatar, pretty interesting character, but this is an anime and manga) - Quartett's Phill - Zero Escape's Sigma (sometimes he was a blockhead, especially in ZTD, but he's a troubled man, though some may argue that he lacks charisma) - Zero Escape's Carlos (your brave action man) - EF's protagonist for the second arc (I believe he was called Keisuke? anyway, I put him with the tsundere Kei and it was cool, man) Male leads I despised with various degrees: - School Days' Makoto (especially in the anime) - Amagami's Junichi Tachibana (in the anime, he's a good for nothing, perverted rascal most of the time) - EF's protagonist for the first arc (he's just... not very cool) - Wanko to Kurasou's protag (half human pets ask him to screw them because they're in heat, he's like, "okay... booty!") - Sakura Beach's protag (gets abused by his friends and he's all okay with it) - Kira Kira's Shikanosuke Maejima (not a very nice person) - Crescendo's protag (kind of an asshole) Note how in the protags that I don't like, I can't remember the names of a lot of them.

I settle for little: - Amagami (happening in the near future, yay) - 12Riven (difficult) - Tenkiame (doable maybe) Edit: forgot about - Kud Wafter

In The Way We All Go (game I recommend wholeheartedly), everything happens in the span of like 3 days, and some heroines are pretty much invisible and don't appear in the story if you don't do a proper selection of choices. So, you have to keep a guide nearby, the game has 21 endings (neat).

Isuzu was pretty good. But rest assured my friend, checking stories here I've come to find there are at least two types of players: the completionists who, like me, go for 100% of the game if possible, and the "OTP supporters" that play a single route and leave the game aside afterwards. This is further complicated when there exists a true route, however. Because you may end up liking one of the routes more than the true one (a dire example is Rin Natsume in Little Busters; I don't care much for her and prefer instead other heroines). And there are games where you have to play all or the majority of the routes to get the full picture (Hoshimemo, I'd say).

Another Japanese reference to punk rock: I'll remember all my life how I skimmed throught that Bleach tome, and found out that Ichigo's "image song" (term used to refer to a song that describes the character or is associated with it in some way) was Bad Religion's "News from the front": Tite Kubo is much more alternative than Key, but this is amusing. Also in this song you can tell a lot of similarities with GirlsDeMo, the girlies are more melodic but it's almost there. Punk is not only ass-sounding bands. By the way, "News from the front" is a song about AIDS.

Real life punks are equally badmouthed, just not as obvious.

First off, I've been following the world of punk rock since high school, in 1999-2000. With that said, any fan can tell that Key's compositions (like the ones in Angel Beats by Girls Dead Monster and a lot of openings, like Philosophyz) sometimes feature heavily melodic, bludgeoning yet simple, blistering guitar punk rock with superb singers and great melodies. Not that I'd say that punk rock is anybody's model culture, but I guess in Japan they understand it differently (well, a lot of Japanese are really fed up with these choking traditions and the conservativeness of the country, so there's that). As a side note, it's worth considering Asian Kung Fu Federation, if you watch a video you can tell they're pretty much geek types with glasses and all, but they came to be one of the most recognised melodic hardcore bands in the world. They definitely had their moment. I guess Japanese focus on the free, wild side of punk (its aspect worth considering) and leave aside the alcohol chugging, the drug doing and all that. Or maybe not. The post is over and no mention of Maeda inside... I guess it's just clickbait Or maybe he's the one at Key that likes punk rock.

It can be not yaoi, but still be otome, what's so difficult about the whole thing? Review your set theory.

Take the label Eroge: it just tells if you're gonna find porn on it or not. It doesn't tell you about the story, characters, or any real elements of the game. Thus, its usefulness is limited.

Then I guess Otome isn't a genre either. Not more than Eroge. There are a lot of variations of Eroge. The only constant is it contains sex scenes. Basically if you can imagine a story with sex scenes, you can create an Eroge, no matter what you write about.

This is when I say I don't usually get aroused reading VN, not even eroge (it doesn't help that most H scenes are badly written or bad in the first place). I always heard that Shounen Manga are aimed at a young male demographic (within Japan, of course) and Shoujo at a young women demographic. There are other ample genres, like Seinen and Jousei (also Seinen tends to be really badly applied). So I think it depends on the audience for which it's created... maybe I don't know what Otome readers like, but oh, the writers do. Also, women share some common tastes throughout the globe, and then some particular quirks for each area. Just as men. They just have to exploit that. Then there are the not-so-obvious categories: Kimagure Orange Road is a romance story and a shounen, given the approach a lot of the scenes take, and really, the protagonist is Kyousuke. Fushigi Yuugi is a shoujo with action, drama, blood and cruelty (Yuu Watase's trademark), but in the end, every man in existence fawns over Miaka. The problem is these genres are very, very wide. And besides, even though there's a lot of lookalike works in manga, there are pioneers in those genres that try things that haven't been done before or take some other foreign elements into it, thus making a richer story. Personally, I feel that Rooke's definition of Shounen is not very accurate. Key's works are shounen-like, Little Busters is a shounen type of story, Riki might be a child of sorts but he's not the action type. And not every shounen is Beyblade either.

Because the approach to story and characters is the same in manga, anime and VN, it's just the medium and the production that changes.

Well, like I said... can you tell the difference between Shounen Manga and Shoujo Manga? Then you can differentiate between Otome and a regular Eroge or pornless VN. And don't forget that the Japanese female audience isn't the same as the Western female audience. The Japanese works are aimed at Japanese people, they don't intend to specifically address people in the West (but, if those gaijin buy it, then all the better). So, bringing The Hunger Games into this is pretty outside our scope.

You may be right after all. Going with that, it's just a datesim for women. Another valid definition that goes well with what I was saying is that Otome is the equivalent to Shoujo Manga in VNs.

Well, that's the thorny thing... Decay said something about "heavy romance", that's one thing girls like. Another is good looking male characters, strong, and attractive love interests. The list goes on and on, depends on the particular writer. I've just noticed the genre might be closer to bishounen, but it's not 100% it. But if CLAMP's stories would be turned into visual novels, they probably would be Otome (though I enjoyed Tokyo Babylon and X madly back in the day, and arguably most major CLAMP works have strong storylines apart from the romance, if there's any). Zetsu Ai too, but that's yaoi.

It's not that hard, I guess. You just have to put things in order and apply logic: "Is aimed at women" -> may be an Otome, or not "It's an Otome" -> is aimed at women A Venn diagram would be in order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram

Scrap any and all visual novels and watch (or read) Kimagure Orange Road instead. The most charismatic love triangle in existence, it changed the face of anime forever.

They turned it into way worse than an Otome. It can still be aimed at women but not be an Otome, I guess. But if it's an Otome, pretty much it's designed for a female audience.

The gist of it is Otome = aimed at women, not starred by women.

An example that comes to mind is Hakuoki. You have a ton of handsome men, but the story seemed interesting, as well as the Meiji period if you're keen on that. I didn't manage to play however.

No, Otome games are directed to female players. As such, they'll tend to portray elements that tick with women, but as you can see, that's a very wide category. Sono Hana games are starred by girls and they aren't otome at all. Having a female MC could mean some sort of male audience pandering. But it's most usual to just have a male MC, self-insert or not.

Derailing my own topic, a bit... I didn't know Clockup was this shovelware factory (and a dark one at that), they have released 3 VNs this year. The last one has come out a bit ago and it's about dark fetishes (I infer): https://vndb.org/v19981/chars Unlike Euphoria, the cover already is NSFW. But strangely enough this isn't marked as a nukige... Clockup really manage to keep their H scenes piping hot while providing some bare minimum of an interesting read.

If we're going for a winter themed VN, why not Hatsuyuki Sakura? It's untranslated though (a true pity, I'd read it). https://vndb.org/v7302

I guess the future full restoration patch (releasing early 2017, hopefully) can be used with your Steam installation. So if you wanna get the game legit and clean, you could get it, and in the future this retranslation project will bring out its full colours, as the great novel it originally was (this can already be glimpsed, but not fully experienced due to the bad translation and cut material). Also it's set in summer, if you're tired of novels set in summer, or prefer another season. Note we're placing our hopes on this retranslation project, I sure hope it turns out well!

Thanks a lot for your effort, Fuwastaff! We appreciate it.