Nandemonai

Apparently. At least that's what the reviews I read say. Doesn't really surprise me considering that even in the very beginning they've been foreshadowing stuff.

Google is your friend. You can find much more accurate information about copyright law on Google than you will find here. Now, I am not a lawyer. But what you are planning on doing is illegal, full stop. It would be classified as a derivative work if it ever went to court. Does this mean you can't do it? No, not at all. Many fan projects never attract official attention at all. But the ones that do always fold. Look at Pokemon Uranium or AM2R or Chrono Resurrection. Also, one thing you absolutely cannot do is charge money or solicit donations. Legally speaking, doing either of these is irrelevant. Practically speaking, you are far more likely to attract the attention of the copyright holders, and they will take you far more seriously than they would otherwise. So if you want to spend a bunch of your own money doing this, be prepared for the eventuality that your work will never see the light of day. (You could always try to get official permission, of course, but, uh, I wouldn't count on it.) How likely is that to happen? If I could predict the future THAT well, you'd be paying me money

Why give you the option of going from 0-8 if they only ever used 3 values? Why not just "low", "medium", and "high"? That's what's dumb. As for Kara no Shoujo, I am convinced there is a bug in one of the investigation scenes. If you investigate certain parts of the scene in the wrong order, you don't find a key piece of evidence, and you're boned. There appears to be no good reason for this.

Yeah, Root Double is another example of how not to do it. They give you a meter that runs from 0-8, but for almost all the choices in the game, it only counts "low", "meduim", or "high". 3, 5, or 7 work almost all the time.

Close, but not quite.

Well, in games that got a sequel, very often a route is the "true" route because it's the canonical route that the writers used to base the sequel off of. Very few games try the Majikoi S way of "here's multiple starting points, which ending are we going off of here?" That's actually a case where true endings are sort of unavoidable. Sequels kind of have to pick one and run with it. Trying to pull an Elder Scrolls and saying "yeah, all the endings happened. Don't ask too many questions" doesn't really work for a story-heavy thing like a VN.

I still think Yuka's bad ending in Crescendo is - while certainly not nearly as happy as her real ending - much better written. As for choices in games, they can certainly go overboard. In recent games they've more or less stopped doing this, but in older games the choice structures were often extremely cryptic. Snow Drop, for example, is actually a significant challenge, but not in a good way. Aside from a handful of traditional choices, there's a lot of "where do I spend time" choices. The game gives no guidance to its mechanics; you simply pick a destination, and there's either a scene there or not. It doesn't tell you each choice has its own list of avaialble events, which aren't available for very long. It also doesn't tell you that if you somewhere and nothing happens, time advances anyway (which probably makes it impossible to get to the real second half of the game). Some of the actual events are also a waste of time, because not all of them are required to get to the second half. You have to hit every event that the game wants you to hit, with little idea of which events those are and no indication when you've already missed an important event. Tokimeki Checkin! is another one with a crazy "route structure". Unlike in most modern games, where the choices are pretty well telegraphed as to who they're getting you closer to (if they aren't literally "pick your pizza" like Princess Evangile), the choices in this one are pretty random. Granted, I hadn't been playing for very long, so it took me awhile to cotton on that all I had to do was figure out which choices led me to interact with the girl I wanted. But still. That game basically requires saving at every choice, because there's no way you can figure out which option does what. Neither one of these two games is a good usage of choice in a VN. I guess the best one I've seen so far would be Littlewitch Romanesque. That one doesn't have a lot of conventional choices, but it still has a lot of choice. Choice in how to build the two mages, and which quests you do, which affects the endings you can get in mostly obvious ways. Edit: Oh, and how could I forget Soul Link? The first half actually makes very excellent use of a great number of choices, by making the protag kind of a badass, and actually making you pick how he approaches a given situation, and if you do stupid shit, then you die.

Seriously. The world needs more Maho. Steins;Gate 0 is not enough.

Yeah, that was one of the things I didn't really like about Tokyo Babel. (I liked the game quite a bit, but it definitely had some issues.) Its route structure was horrible. Basically, the game has a clear intended route reading order - Raziel -> Sorami -> Lilith - but it doesn't actually force you to read Raziel's path before Sorami's. (It does lock Lilith's for last.) And it does that thing ChaosRaven complained about, where routes will just gloss over stuff that was the focus of previous routes. I'm not actually opposed to using routes in that way, because it is something a VN can do: it uses the interactivity to change the story in a way that a book can't. But in Tokyo Babel, the characters just know stuff that was mentioned in previous routes sometimes. They gloss over stuff they really shouldn't. It doesn't feel right.

Maybe that word doesn't mean what I think it means. Just to make sure, what exactly is a ladder route structure?

So how would you classify the true route of Steins;Gate, then? It doesn't seem to easily fit into any of the four types. #1 is the closest, except that those endings can't really even be called "routes" except for two characters, and the true route focuses more on Okabe than on any of the girls, in a way. True routes can be good, they can be bad. In a game that's highly plot driven, a true ending is kind of a must, I think. Both because sequels are really difficult without one, and because it just makes the story work better, usually. But in a game like Princess Evangile, having there be a "true route" would be even more annoying than Konomi-sama and Ruriko-chan not having routes.

They're very careful not to mention exactly what kind of school. Sure, it quacks like a Japanese high school, and doesn't look at all like a Japanese college. But most games won't actually use those words. In fact it was Sofurin policy for awhile (and maybe still is, I dunno) that you couldn't say "high school", for this exact reason. Which leads to silly situations in some games. Chrono Clock, for instance, establishes that one of the characters is three years younger than the main character. But she's 18, right? Of course she is. So, if she's 18, he must be twenty-one, right? Wow, that's amazing! Why, they could serve booze in the school cafeteria, legally! At the college they obviously must be attending!

I especially like the unintended irony of posting here to say "I think I started promoting the game too early"... while promoting your game on Fuwa.

Darklord_Rooke's been sick, so progress has been kind of slow recently. Progress update: Editing is now 19.2% complete.

It is not avoidable, no. However, as someone who has marginally more than zero tolerance for that kind of thing myself, I can definitely confirm that this will not be a problem. The story takes what happens very seriously, and it is exactly one scene. It is not glorified in any way. You really should pick it up if that's the only thing that worries you about the game.

$40 seems standard for a full-length visual novel. Granted, it's been so long I don't have access to the email accounts I used to buy G-Collections releases when they were new ... but the wayback machine tells me in 2006, $39.95 was the standard G-C package edition price (I checked Come See Me Tonight, Crescendo, and Do You Like Horny Bunnies 2). Downloads were $5 cheaper. (They only wanted $34.95 for I'm Gonna Nurse You, though.) And this was in 2006 dollars. I think it's after Peter Payne took over following G-C folding up shop (Figures of Happiness was their last release), but before he rolled out big changes later. Shortly after this most GC games were $20. But in the immediate aftermath of their collapse, I don't think the prices had changed. I think this is what G-C charged back in the day. So in the 2006 capture of the G-Collections site seen here you can see the pricing of the G-C catalogue. Now, after adjusting for inflation, $40 in 2005 is about $49 today. I haven't actually started playing SakuSaku yet, but it is, I hear, pretty damn good. Paying $40 for it sure beats paying $49 plus shipping (don't remember how much it would've been) for Come See Me Tonight (which, uh, is not). $20 plus launch discount seems undervalued, honestly. I probably would not sell it that cheap.

Oh, nice. Especially since it ended, I don't see this one brought up much.. Such a shame it never got picked up officially.

Well, good old Sekai Project mentioned the new release date on their sekaiproject twitter, but not their denpasoft_pr twitter. What that means, I guess we'll find out on Monday. It probably just means they're busy at a con this weekend. Doesn't mean it's not annoying.

There technically is. I dislike both of those things too. The thing is there's not much sex in Demonbane at all, and most of it is vanilla. And if you've ever wanted to see giant robots fight Cthulhu, well, that's not a particularly common thing. Haven't gotten around to reading the last route yet, but the two I've been through already are pretty awesome.

Never got around to that particular route from that game, but Crescendo itself is really good.

It's Yuzusoft. Sekai Project has, you may have noticed, licensed quite a lot of Yuzusoft titles. Three titles so far, and none of them released yet. If they do well, A*I is likely to be picked up.

Oh, hey, nice find. Hopefully it hits Denpasoft around the same time (that was their original plan, but after what happened I wouldn't be surprised if that was also out the window).

That sounds a lot like they ARE animating the whole game like School Days, and they're just repurposing the animation from the anime to save some money. That might work out okay. It's ... questionable whether the end result will work well, but if it at least doesn't try to dumb down the VN's script to match the anime then it might actually not suck.

Huh, no one mentioned Demonbane yet? Well, of the games I've played that might fit the bill, Demonbane is clearly the best. Edit: Also, if you liked Tokyo Babel, take a look at Shadows of Pygmalion (by the same dev).

Yeah, I actually watched that trailer and I could tell it was all anime. The thing is the game has a bunch of stuff that got cut from the anime. For time, and for turning a branching game into a linear anime. If they're animating all that stuff up to the same level as the TV show, that would - well, it still wouldn't look great, but it might be something worth buying. On the one hand, that would be really expensive so they're not likely to be doing that. On the other hand, if all they do is recut the VN to fit the pre-existing animation ... then why wouldn't I just watch the anime again? And surely the people making it must know this would be a problem. One would hope.