Nandemonai

Clearly, most of the big announcements happened earlier, at AX and Otacon. Still, some interesting things.

Yeah, I take that to mean that they're likely planning on doing something like how Shiny Days handled it. Like, release a patch without taking any credit for it. Hasn't been confirmed yet, though, so we'll just have to wait and see.

What do you mean? They talked about Maitetsu at a Denpasoft panel, which basically confirms an adult release. They said they have been working hard to make it happen. They said they think they have a solution that will make "everybody happy", with emphasis on "everybody". They didn't announce that they were going to talk about it, then just not do it, and not publically comment. They said it wasn't ready to announce yet, and they wanted to finalize it. They even said they hoped to have something to announce by the end of the year. That doesn't sound like an empty promise or their previous terrible communication. It's not as definitive as I would like, but it's a lot better than not even knowing if they're going to bother to try.

Trails of Cold Steel 3 will be the last game in the Erebonia arc, but the series as a whole (which has 3 arcs already, 2 of which are translated) will continue for at least 2 more arcs after Cold Steel.

Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

That translation, though ...

The game almost doesn't even need a walkthrough. Other than the Roxanne ending, each choice leads directly to a route. Roxanne has a few intermediate choices; you have to cum inside her when the game asks, and then tell her you'll be back (apparently this only happens after you've already gotten another ending? not sure). This will unlock a new menu option at one of the later choices. Other than that, you don't need a walkthrough at all. All the other routes are decided by 2 choices and there's only like 3 in the whole game.

Oh, certainly. If you restrict yourself to looking at popular VNs, or VNs from companies with a proven track record, you'll find that most of them tend to be fairly good quality. And I'll even grant that if you look at the best of both markets, Japanese games currently are way out in front of OELVNs. But that's not what "most VNs have crap stories" means (which was the original quote). Most of them ... have got crappy stories. Because "Japanese VN" includes everything. Including all the super low-budget stuff, like Appetite and Softhouse Seal and Hentai Industries. And let's not forget all the doujin stuff you can find on DLSite. If you take all the pizza delivery simulation nukige, and all the highly derivative stuff that comes out, and all the low-budget bargain labels, and throw them into the mix along with your Liarsoft and Innocent Grey titles, you will find that ... most Japanese VNs have a crappy story. Sturgeon's Law would like to have a word with you

Sekai Project may say that, but I'm not quite sure I believe it. If this really was purely about physical edtions, then why even offer "just the game kthxbai" tiers? Which were quite popular; more than a third of the backers picked tiers that included just the 18+ digital version of the game, and another 10% picked just the steam version. Over half the backers picked a tier that didn't include any physical goods whatsoever.

Uh, that was a joke. Perhaps it wasn't a very good joke, but it was (supposed to be) a joke.

But the story literally involve aliens from outer space. Does that not literally make it rocket science? For a bit of a different perspective - I didn't really like the story of the first Nekopara either. (I liked the second one more.) My reaction to the first Nekopara was that it mostly managed to not be boring. I also don't agree that Nekopara is basically a nukige; there's too few scenes, and the h vs. non-h ratio is too low. Nekopara tries to go for comedy and is sort of hit or miss with it. I found Corona Blossom to be similar, and that's why I still haven't beaten it. I'm interested enough to not want to put it down, but not enough to want to play it.

I might be interested in a story like that. Most of the time I've seen NTR-type stuff, it's involved automatic turnoffs for me like coersion, blackmail, or rape.

I am skeptical VR would work well in a VN format. VNs rely on disembodied text that isn't really a part of the world, it's a combination of narration (we're wiretapping protag-kun's internal monologue) and subtitles. I don't see either one of these working well in VR. Narration in text form has the problem of being highly distracting. In 2D, it's just superimposed over whatever you're looking at. In 3D, same deal. You can see what's going on in the scene, and read the text, at the same time because you're just focusing on a screen. Not so in VR. VR has to basically project the text as if it were displayed on a virtual monitor somewhere in the 3D space. You can either leave the monitor at a fixed position, which I see being really hard to focus on the scene and read the text at the same time. Or you can move the fake-monitor constantly so that it syncs up with wherever people are supposed to be looking at in the current scene. I see that being even more annoying. Subtitling what other people are saying is going to be even more distracting. Then there's the problem that most VNs are static, and tell rather than show any kind of complicated action. If there's a badass fight going on, you aren't watching a movie of the fight happen. You're watching still images that shift occasionally, accompanied by a (hopefully) epic description of the badassery unfolding. I just don't see VR being a good fit for this presentation style. Maybe someone could make it work, and that would be pretty cool, but I'm not convinced.

I don't think market oversaturation can entirely explain the downturn. If my facts are correct (and I haven't been following them closely enough to be sure, so they might not), sales have declined by close to an order of magnitude. I don't think there's an order of magnitude more games coming out now than there were in the past. I do remember hearing that the game makers' strategy for dealing with the decline in sales per title was to try to release more games, so I can believe that a market glut has definitely contributed. If the problem were just market saturation, then the total amount of money spent (total funds spent in Japan in any given month on eroge) would roughly stay the same. I'm under the impression that the total has instead been declining. Of course, I could be blowing smoke out of my ass here

Ain't that the truth. Once upon a time, in the late 2000's, I started learning Japanese. I was sick and tired of all the good Japanese-developed video games that I couldn't play. At that time, nearly all console games were Japanese. Most of the Western-developed ones kinda sucked. However, a funny thing happened. The market changed; over the course of the PS2's lifespan, console games started shifting away from being an almost entirely Japanese production. English developers gradually stepped up their game, and kept stepping it up, and now all the best-selling titles on consoles are Western-developed (unless you're Nintendo). Now, if I'm not mistaken, the Japanese VN market is in a serious crisis right now. Sales have plummeted compared to where they were ten years ago, and seem to have reached a new stable point. Naturally, this will affect product quality. OELVN developers also have not had very long to mature compared to the Japanese market. So in the future, I would be very surprised if the OELVN market did not significantly improve from where it is now. It just depends on what kind of timeframe you're talking about. Six months from now probably looks a lot like today. Six years? Not so much. Six decades? The Japanese VN industry isn't even six decades old yet! Who the hell knows?

Somewhere on the net there's a post-mortem from the guys who were originally planning on releasing it all those years ago. I know I read it. I don't remember anything that was in it, unfortunately. It was very close to release, but was cancelled. The beta floating around is a leak, but it's said to be nearly complete.

People wanted H. Frontwing was making a kinetic novel. They didn't want it to be like the old days (say, Nocturnal Illusion) where the main character would have sex with everybody ... then pick his One True Love for the ending. So if h-scenes with all the girls are canon, that's a problem. If all the h-scenes are with one girl, that's also a problem. If the h-scenes are what-if, imaginary, then it doesn't matter! I forget where exactly they said this? I think it must have been one of their IndieGogo updates.

I'm free to speculate? Total freedom? Well, in that case, I think MangaGamer is going to blindside everybody by announcing a license rescue of ... say ... Time Stripper Mako. And they managed to ninja Persona 5. You never know. It, uh, it might happen? I hope they pick up SKM, but I'm sensing trouble from the SKM project. I also hope they pick up Shuffle: Essence, but given the way that relations with Navel seem to have cooled off, I'm ... not optimistic. As for games from existing partners, I wouldn't be surprised by more Moonstone Cherry games or more Liarsoft games.

I'm not sure, but I think you mean 'Shiny Days'? Jast's reorganized their forum, so I can't find the official announcement anymore. Here's a writeup of it: http://fuwanovel.net/2015/04/endorse-jasts-censorship-shiny-days/ In short, some people "affiliated" with Sekai worked with Jast on the game, but those people were never "against" any part of it. They specifically said that nobody involved in the project had any moral objections to any part of the game. Instead, the game was censored for legal reasons. It was still censored, and some Sekai people were involved, but it was censored because they were worried about going to prison. It's not true that I don't have a problem with that, but my problem isn't with Jast USA, it's with the government. Not the same thing at all. The majority - in my experience - of VNs either don't feature underage characters at all, or feature high schoolers going out with ... other high schoolers. (The games like to get cute and pretend they're not set in a high school, by using precisely ambiguous terms like "Academy", but they aren't fooling anybody. We all know these are high schoolers.) Middle school is significantly younger. Most games don't go there. Also, the rape in Shiny Days isn't just statutory - it's forcible. These things put Shiny Days significantly further than even Sweet Sweat in Summer (or whatever it's called, I forget exactly) because in that game, they're the same (nebulous, ill defined) age.

Sekai Project has a few games with upcoming Vita ports from their Kickstarters, I believe. But MangaGamer has never gone anywhere near consoles. Any console port would have to be all-ages only, as no current console will allow AO or unrated content. But more importantly, consoles take a cut of everything sold, and have complex (read: expensive) certification processes.

That's amazing. I'm under the impression that games involving ex-team-members are almost impossible. (Littlewitch Romanesque is by a technically closed company, but apparently all the staffers moved to this new company that has rights, sort of like how ADV morphed into Sentai, I guess.) Like, the reason Jast USA doesn't put out Crowd games anymore, is that all the people they used to work with at Crowd left the company, so it's essentially a stranger to them now. It sounds like Supipara really was a dream project, labor of love for the creators. All the more a shame that Supipara vol. 1's release barely moved the needle on the fundraiser.

They managed to piss me off enough that I said 'enough, I'm done with the whole company'. I probably would have bought Flowers, except it's made by IG, so no thanks. I don't suppose I can dispute that I have a terrific grudge against the game The first Kara no Shoujo is really good ... except that it has a crazy cliffhanger that (apparently) is only briefly touched on in the sequel.

Not the least bit true! Time is neither free nor unlimited. I actually want my money back for Kara no Shoujo 2, for instance. A true land mine. I didn't even get past the insufferably-long flashback to a bunch of boring people I don't give a crap about doing boring things I didn't care about. Hell, even the ones I did care about (because they're in the first game) were boring! When I heard the first game's cliffhanger was only addressed in a cursory way, I said 'okay, that's it. They're just jerking my chain, I'm outta here' and deleted the game/the saves. Did I pay for the game? Yeah. Is it worth playing? Not even a little bit. As for the OP's quandry - that's always tough. Sometimes, sticking it out gets you past a rough spot into the awesome parts later on. Sometimes that rough spot is right in the beginning, and that's real hard. Soul Link is like this; the beginning is very uneven, but the game picks up in a big way right after the prologue. They were trying to establish the characters, but succeeded only in writing some real generic pablum that really doesn't do the story justice. The problem is, how to tell whether you're reading Soul Link (a bad first impression, which then gets good) or Kara no Shoujo 2 (a bad first impression ... because it's just bad)? That's hard. See, if you find yourself thinking "I want to read this, but not right now" ... only months go by and you still haven't picked it back up ... what this really means is you don't actually want to read it. Sometimes this is because of something temporary (like the intro to Soul Link) and sometimes it's a sign that you're better off moving on to something else, because it's just not for you.

Sorry, dude, that's not really an update. The 7/22 status update put the game in that state, and it hasn't changed since (as in, it is verbatim identical). (I wouldn't want to read too much into the tea leaves, but it sounds to me like the game is waiting to be ported; as in, porting hasn't started, or it would say so in the update.) It's not uncommon for MangaGamer releases to get parked in line behind other releases they're working on. They are juggling, uh, a lot of pies here. However, in terms of 'what does this mean for the game coming out' - Since the game is parked, god knows how much longer it will stay parked. If I had to take bets, I'd say it won't start moving until at least after Da Capo 3 is out of porting and into beta testing. Maybe more.

Hell if I know. If I were to take a guess, I'd guess that KF 2 If is an alternate-continuity remake of KF 2 where some stuff is different, but I never actually played any of these games (other than KF because it's in English now).