Nandemonai

Yes, but for the love of god don't even think about playing ZTD without playing the other two.

Progress updated. Now at 6.5%. Ryechu finally got clear of school, it's the week before Christmas, he should have time to make more progress next week. I would have waited another day or two, but starting tomorrow I'm out of town and won't be able to post to Fuwa. I get back late next week.

There's also Demonbane and Steins;Gate.

I'll recommend Littlewitch Romanesque since I don't see anyone else recommending it.

Yes, really. Yeah, yeah, I know, total necro (even though the thread itself was necroed by someone else I'm still replying to a 6 month old post), and I've posted things like this before. But it bears repeating. People need to understand the way the law works. Distribution means just that, distribution. Whether you charge for it, or distribute it for free, it's still distribution. You are (probably) correct in that you can pay people to translate a VN for you if you want to read it. (It's arguble, but probably okay. I'm not actually a lawyer so I don't want to get too far into the weeds.) But the instant you spread that patch around, even for free, you've broken the law. And the people you paid have also broken the law. The international treaties that define how copyright works specifically include translation rights. Mods are tolerated. You do not have the legal right to make a mod against the will of the makers/publishers of the original game. The games that have vibrant mod communities, have them either because the publisher has explicitly published some kind of "mod license" that gives modders permission to mod the game, or because they have chosen to voluntarily not enforce their rights, either because they think mods are cool, or because they think the mods help their bottom line. Just try releasing a mod for Skyrim where you have to (let's say) have sex with, then kill and eat, children in order to win the game, and see how long before Bethesda "asks" you to take it down. Similarly, basically all fan patches are illegal. There are a couple of reasons nobody actually gets in trouble. One, most Japanese companies don't even know about them. Two, some don't care, since most patches require owning a legit copy. Three, the ones that care will have a very hard time suing in a foreign country to enforce their copyrights. Four, to my knowledge, no group has ever ignored a C&D. Five, once you win, what are you going to collect? These groups have no money to pay any judgement. Sooner or later, some fan translation outfit will eventually get an official C&D, and they will say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" and release the patch anyway. They will be asking to be sued. Whether they will actually get sued, who can say? But there is no doubt that it is against the law.

How to put this ... You are looking at visual novels the wrong way. It's like watching a single movie - say a James Bond movie - and trying to extrapolate to what movies as a whole are like. You can find VNs telling lots of different kinds of stories. Even just among romance VNs. There are all kinds of romance games. There are games that are little more than excuses to get into the girls' pants, in which the excuse plot is romance-related. There are games about doomed romance. There's even (if I'm informed correctly) a horror-romance VN called Gore Screaming Show that has quite a stellar reputation (though I haven't played it myself). To answer your specific question, it depends on the game. Sometimes, all the girls almost entirely disappear from the story once you land on a girl's route. Sometimes, all the girls are in love with you from day one. Sometimes, they all hate you, and the story is about slowly winning them over. Sometimes, just the girl whose route you're on falls for you. Sometimes, more than one falls for you and it's played for comedy; sometimes, for drama. I know of one game (OzMafia, an otome game) that actually takes it to the logical extreme: for some of the characters, when you enter character A's route, character B gets jealous, and you can actually switch from A to B. Note that you could also continue on A's route, or by playing differently, take B's normal route. And then there's the infamous School Days, which simply ... lets you choose. There are two main heroines, they both love you, you can stay faithful, or not; if you don't, very bad things happen when they find out, involving body counts! Now, translated, that's another matter. But there's still a lot of stuff available.

Yes, but most of the ones I know of all fall on the dark side. Min Dead Blood and Gore Screaming Show are the only ones coming to mind, since that's not really my thing.

I couldn't pick a favorite from these, because I like them all. Sadly they're underrepresented in what I've played so far.

It's worse than that. The cliffhanger was declared non-canon. Reading between the lines, it's clear to me that Zero Time Dilemma was a very troubled production. It almost didn't get made at all. And the creator has apparently admitted he had a script for ZTD written alongside VLR, but that he threw it out and rewrote it. And then he said that the cliffhanger in VLR "was never intended to be canon", and also said that he regrets presenting it as if it were canon. Well, I don't believe him. I think that he had to throw out the script for ZTD because he couldn't have done it justice with the budget he was given. I think he lied about the reason why he did it because, well, that's what you do. I also think he lied about the cliffhanger not being canon because, well, that's what you do. The truth as I see it, is that we were either going to get a half-hearted resolution to 999/VLR's story, or none at all, and the creator decided something is better than nothing. It's still a disappointment. I agree with you that VLR is a masterpiece, and it's a shame to see financial difficulties mar its legacy.

You don't use an allegory like the Seven Deadly Sins and not have seven of them. Not having played the game (or knowing anything about it), I presume it comes up. Probably as a twist of some kind. Say, perhaps the seventh died, the other six are after their revenge, and his death is the motivator behind the whole plot. Or perhaps the protagonist is the seventh. It might even turn out that one of the protagonist's allies is the seventh in disguise. There are ... multiple options.

Well, the editor was caught in an unholy storm of term papers and final exams that burned with the loathsome fires of Gehenna. He theoretically escaped today, which of course means he will have had ... a few hours, perhaps, to edit anything. But now he should be on break. I'll ping him next week for a status update. On the coding front, things have been pretty quiet. Which reminds me, I thought I'd mentioned that before, but double checking, I guess I haven't. MadPierre flaked, in October mnakamura indicated he would take a look at it but not necessarily right away. There's no rush since editing is still ongoing. And when editing is done, I plan on getting this into Asenheim. So I don't think I need anything right now, no. Things have just been quiet mostly because of school.

I'm going to suggest two anime that most people wouldn't really call romance anime: Crest/Banner of the Stars and Spice and Wolf. They both feature extremely well-fleshed out characters, more so than usual. I'll also recommend Koi Kaze because it is an extremely non-fetishized take on forbidden romance.

Alright, all right, already. [duck]

1. To the extent people use Let's Plays to avoid paying for the game, I dislike them. To the extend they promote the game and bring in awareness from people who never heard of it before, I like them. I can't imagine anything more boring than watching someone else play a game I could be playing myself, so Let's Plays have zero interest for me personally. 2. This is kind of a broken record from my answer to #1, but to the extent people use Let's Plays to steal the content, they're bad. To the extend they increase buzz and bring in new customers, they're good.

I'm going to suggest Demonbane; it's clearly fantasy, and it does not have the sort of depressing endings you're talking about. Also, because it technically fits your definition , I'm going to suggest Funbag Fantasy. It has a serious fantasy plotline, so you can read it for the articles if you want (so to speak), and it definitely has a happy ending.

The two that I know off the top of my head, that haven't already been mentioned, are Princess Evangile and Snow Sakura.

That's a common thing when game engines encounter characters they don't know how to display. At one point someone uses the word 'cafe' with an accent mark on it, and it was represented as "caf?".

Working Designs is ... controversial. They heavily altered the scripts of anything they touched. (I have heard tell that they introduced a few plot holes into Lunar 2; because so much dialog was completely changed to be funny / goofy, some dialog addressing the backstory was removed, creating confusion / plot holes that weren't in the original.) On the other hand, they were putting out extremely well-written dialog at a time when that was very hard to come by in official localizations. It's much more common now, but in the bad old days, translations were often ... highly sketchy, workmanlike, like the translators were translating a technical manual instead of a work of fiction; and just generally barely competent. And then there was Working Designs, who went the extra mile to put real dialog into their games. It just ... some of it hasn't aged well.

Which is literally what I just said? My point was that we have no way of knowing for sure how many people paid for it, but it's not unreasonable a relatively large number (by VN standards) of people might have paid for at least some of the game.

Conjeuror's blog post on MangaGamer was all I needed to hear to know that I'm interested in this game. It reminds me of the creation of Type-Moon; Tsukihime was originally a doujin title that kicked so much ass it turned them into a proper company.

Well, according to Steamspy a lot of people have the game. But since the pay portions were released as DLC add-ons to the base game, there's no way at all of seeing how many people actually shelled out money for the game. Let's assume the real figure is quarter of Steamspy's estimate, and further assume ten percent of that number paid for the DLC. That works out to about five thousand copies. What's that mean? How accurate is that guesstimate? No way to tell for sure. But there's a decent chance the game sold reasonably well.

Lo, let it be known thru all the four corners of the earth, that Decay did pay real money for a VN, because he grew overfond of the original. Truly I say unto thee, words literally cannot express the sublime awesomeness of this blessed fact.

Oh. Then nevermind

Yeah, don't read too much into it. If this release isn't by the original Japanese developers, they probably only have limited rights. These sorts of thing are commonly split up either by geographic region or by language. Since they put it on Steam, they seem to have worldwide rights; but I wouldn't be surprised if they don't have English language rights. Also notice the wording. They explicitly deny that they're confirming anything, and then it says they "would like to" release an English version as well. Not that they're "working on it", but that they'd like to. Now, what does that mean? A whole lot of 'not much'; nitpicking wording like that is always iffy, and even more so when the people in question probably don't speak English very well. But it's still something.

There's a reason Japanese VNs, etc. feature Japanese settings so much. Why do the aliens always attack Japan? Why does Tokyo Tower get blown up so much? For the same reasons New York gets attacked in Hollywood movies. It's more familiar to the intended audience, yes, but also, it's more familiar to the writers. One of the big pitfalls is trying to write about something you don't know anything about. So I'd avoid trying to go too Japanese, unless you've actually lived there for a significant amount of time. You'll either have to spend a ton of time researching all kinds of things, or you'll get a lot of it wrong. You really need to understand why those stereotypes work for the Japanese audience in order to be able to use them correctly. Also, don't include something because "it's expected". Saya no Uta departs from 'the usual characters' rather, uh, disturbingly; this is the reason it's so well regarded. Include something because it adds to your story. Especially don't include something if you don't really like it, and are only including it because you think it's a bullet point people will want to see.