Nandemonai

If what you really mean is 'short VN', I'll recommend Saya no Uta. It's not technically a kinetic novel, but it's got like 2 choices and it's not a long game at all. Also can't believe nobody's mentioned Nekopara or Neko-nin yet. Sure, they're not the greatest, but a short mix-it-up game in between longer games doesn't have to be.

Oldie, but a goodie: Nocturnal Illusion still has one of the best soundtracks, period. VN, games in general, TV and movies, everything,..

If VNDB is to be believed, those aren't even real catgirls. They're normal girls wearing headbands.

Slight correction: Most games have a few sample pics on their official sites. What is illegal is ripping the entire CG set and posting it online for any reason, or downloading the entire CG set to keep if you don't own the game. Posting a few screenshots (even if they're not of the same CG that the developer posts to their site) is much murkier. if your screenshots are attached to a review, that's probably fine. Browsing a complete rip someone else illegally uploaded, in order to see if you want to buy the game, is murkier but probably also fine. Edit: If you were wondering 'what about what VNDB is doing' (by posting sample pictures for many games) - That is probably legal. They are a database, and it's beneficial for a database to be holding a few pictures of the game to give people a feel for what the game's CG looks like, mugshots of the characters in the 'characters' view, and a screenshot of the cover art. At least in the US, they are almost certainly covered by Fair Use. There is no way VNDB got permission from every game company whose software they host pictures of. For one, many of these companies no longer exist. But because VNDB is not directly competing with, or undermining the market for, the VN companies, what they're doing would likely be found to be legal.

None of the characters, including the MC, want to be there. As for the H, I found every scene in the game utterly repellent. Even the theoretically more vanilla scenes. I didn't read any of them. As for the story, it's interesting - it certainly kept me interested in finishing it. But after I was done, I ultimately found it unsatisfying. The story is at war with itself. The latter half makes the most interesting aspect of the first part into an ice cream koan - undermining it and making what was interesting about it basically irrelevant. The true ending makes very little sense. The explanation behind the first part doesn't make any sense, either. One character's personality and actions make sense only if you stop considering them a 'character' with believable motivations and recognize that they're a walking plot device. Considering how highly this title was praised by those who like the dark side (Nargrakhan, etc), the fact that I wasn't overly impressed with it has convinced me to be far more selective screening dark side titles. I'm just giving Maggot Baits a hard pass, for instance. Nope. Nuh-huh. Not happening.

Oh, that's easy. Those projects aren't "basically finished", and Sekai has terrible project management skills. People will put up with fan patches that are glitchy, require people to install locale support for a language they don't even speak just to run the game, and has a kind of crappy presentation cause the 'patch' is made by hacking the executable so there's lots of little engine issues. People will not put up with that kind of thing from a legit company. The customer base will be like 'what the fuck, dumbasses?' and the licensors may be offended at how poorly their products have been treated. A crappy release like Leyline or Hoshizora does more than just make Sekai look inept. It also tarnishes the reputation of the licensor by association. They aren't likely to be fans of that. Sekai seems to repeatedly suffer from issues that ... to put it charitably... speak to a lack of experience managing IT projects. The sort of trouble Sekai is having is what happens when you have incompetent management. Incompetent rank-and-file employees produce one kind of bad result. Incompetent management produces bad results that are often far worse, and larger scale. Take Leyline for example. 1) Sekai should have known there were untranslated lines in the product. Why didn't they? Because they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: they made a small change after testing was finished. I.e. they shipped an untested build. 2) They should have known better than to ship a game where, if they ever patched the game's script, the engine would delete saves and make people start over. This is a technical limitation they absolutely should have known about. They don't seem to have considered the high likelihood that this engine limitation would vastly complicate their lives. 3) The first two items combine very poorly. Releasing a build that is untested has been known to be playing with fire for a long time. It drastically increases the odds that you're going to have some kind of problem. Hell, this is so well known that in some places I've worked, doing that is grounds for termination. And when you know that, if you do have a problem, it'll be an enormous clusterfuffle to fix it, then you either fix the engine before releasing it, or you be extra super careful to make sure it's perfect before it goes out, so you won't ever have to update it. Here, they decided it would be too much work and delay the project too long to try and rework the engine. (Not without reason; look at how long the delay was once they had no choice but to do it anyway.) That's ... not exactly 'fine', but sometimes you have to go with the least bad option among your bad choices. But then they did something that increased the odds that something would be wrong with the scripts. Something that's widely known to be a terrible idea. Or take Hoshizora or Chrono Clock. Both of these games shipped with localization issues severe enough they decided to redo it. Well, how did that happen? How did this not get caught much earlier in the process? It would have been a lot cheaper and quicker to catch these issues after (say) 5% of the game text was done.

It's the second time. The first time wasn't due to egregious delays (which has been a big problem for Sekai recently) but was rather because the company they partnered with turned out to be involved in some shady stuff. "Ongoing legal issues and noncompliance" is really vague and could mean, well, anything. But astroturfing paid review spam? If Steam catches anyone involved, and it turns out Sekai project did anything that looks like they were complicit, Steam might cut off access not just to the dev and that one game. Valve would likely cut off Sekai Project entirely (as in, ban them and delist their entire catalogue). So the dev doing this posed, basically, an existential threat to Sekai as a whole, by way of tainting Sekai by association. So I'm 100% behind Sekai in that one specific circumstance. It was a giant clusterfuffle, but it's clearly someone else's fault.

Project is not dead. The editor hasn't been around for awhile; some personal stuff came up he has to deal with. I've been going through a list of questionable stuff he's been finding and > 85% of the items on it are translation errors I'm consequently not sure what the actual completion percentage is. It will come out when it comes out. I first started working on this in 2011, if I remember correctly. Definitely I want it over the finish line, but I also don't want to leave it full of errors. Just because that was good enough for the original translators doesn't mean it's good enough for me

Family Project is the only one that comes to mind.

$40K is not a lot of money. I'm pretty sure it just didn't go nearly as far as she thought it would, and 18 months later the Kickstarter money was gone along with a giant pile of her own.

The entire point of Persona 3's story is how one finds meaning in one's life, given the inevitability of death. That's why all the FES and P3P stuff about saving folks is non-canon. That's why they might engage in shenanigans to allow the P3 protag to show up in (say) Persona Q, but they'll always arrange it to be temporary shenanigans. Setting him free can never happen on-screen. The closest they will come is setting Elizabeth on a path to gain her own Fool arcana, so she can become a client of the Velvet Room. We know what she wants from such an arrangement. She wants him back. They can say 'Perhaps, someday, but the road will be long and arduous' and maybe even imply she'll succeed eventually. But he will never just show up again saying 'Hi everybody!' Letting him cheat death would cheapen the point of the story.

You probably wouldn't recover anything. If the project died because of creative troubles (i.e. 'I wrote myself into a corner, I can't fix it, the project's dead') but there was money left, it would likely have already been returned. Like you said, it doesn't smell like a scam project either. (If it was, there's a very slim chance some governmental entity intervenes and makes her disgorge whatever it can find, but unfortunately the amount's probably too low to interest any of those.) So either the project is technically-not-dead but shuffling along so slowly it will likely never come out, or it ran out of money years ago and is dead. It doesn't matter which it is, the instant anyone files suit (or threatens to) and she lawyers up, the lawyer will say 'This project's attached obligations onto you. You can't reasonably fulfill those obligations, so you're insolvent. Declare bankruptcy.' See, a failed Kickstarter project is the kind of thing bankruptcy law is for. Before it was invented, if you launched a project like this and it went belly-up, you either made everyone good or you went to jail 'until you did'. But going to jail just meant you were even less able to pay people back, so you rotted there forever. Naturally, people were very unlikely to launch such projects under the circumstances. Bankruptcy is set up to protect people in the event something like this goes pear shaped on the theory we're all better off if people can take risks like this without completely ruining their lives if it goes badly. TL;DR - If anyone sues, she declares bankruptcy and walks away. Even if she doesn't, and you actually win, the reason the project died in the first place is there IS no money. You can't squeeze blood out of a stone, and if you try it's your hands that come away bloody. A court can issue a piece of paper saying she owes you money, but if she hasn't got it, well, you aren't going to get it out of her.

My problem is I've reached a point where I actually kind of have too much swag. I don't just go for swag the way I used to, both because I'm running out of space, and because of going in for things like The Last Guardian special edition (got bored, put it down halfway through) or the Persona 5 special edition (game's TL issues and struggles to nail the landing soured me on it) or the Ni no Kuni special edition (it's... not Ghibli Movie: The RPG). So what I want to do is play the game and then buy swag. Chrono Clock, for instance. I decided I wanted one of those wallscrolls. Turns out I could only get one via one of the Japanese stores that will ship overseas. Wallscroll itself was relatively cheap, shipping was an arm and a leg. When I backed the Kickstarter I could have gone for a wallscroll and probably paid a similar amount. But I hadn't played the game yet. (I did go in for the drama CD because I figured it wouldn't be sold seperately.) So for Irotoridori, I bought some wallscrolls and keychains because hey, they're nice wallscrolls and keychains. Spend a couple hundred bucks, get the complete set. But I'm taking a chance. I could always play the game and decide "I hate the main character" or "the game expects me to overlook the fact character X is malevolently psychopathic because the writers seem to think it's funny" or even for no reason I could articulate other than the Eight Deadly Words "I don't care what happens to these people". I don't expect this, but I have been disappointed in similar ways before by things I was looking forward to, and I'm sure I will be again. Consequently I'm in a bit of a weird spot. Spend the money now, and maybe throw it down the drain. Or don't, and then be kicking myself over loving the game and wanting the cool swag, but not being able to get it. Because I can't decide I want the swag after playing the game.

"Yet". Hapymaher's fandisk hasn't been released "yet". With Hapymaher taking slot #4 for 2018 there's a pretty good likelihood that MangaGamer will pick it up. They've picked up a lot of fandisks in the past. Da Capo 3, yeah, probably not. They released a few Da Capo fandisks back in the day ... but not in a long time. And you can never guarantee you'll be able to finish the complete series. Shit happens. Look at NISA stealing Trails from XSEED. Numerous manga series have had their English versions cancelled. Yeah, it's a bad idea to be cavalier about starting a super-long series. But starting a long series always comes with uncertainty. Sometimes a game bombs so hard you have no choice but to abandon ship. Sometimes the property becomes mired in licensing hell partway through and releases just kind of stop. Sometimes your company's falling apart. VN companies aren't the most stable companies in the world. You're essentially advocating that nobody should have ever licensed Irotoridori. And that MangaGamer shouldn't have licensed the Steampunk series, or Da Capo 3, or Funbag Fantasy, or Koihime, or Kara no Shoujo. After all, they're still making new games for both KnS and Koihime, and probably will for a long time. MangaGamer certainly hasn't committed. Sorry, but that sounds like a bad deal. I prefer it the other way. Yeah, only getting Irotoridori will kind of suck, if that's the way things turn out. But there are really only 2 reasons they'd turn out that way: 1) Sol Press goes under; 2) the game bombs.

Definitely start with route A. The game gives you the choice to do route B first, but there's spoilers for route A in it, and route A is the better route.

MangaGamer's aid was the most high profile and dramatic. It was also the most recent. Also, it probably wasn't as useless as you think. The project succeeded by like three hundred and fifty bucks. That's less than 10 people (at the $40 level). MangaGamer has more than forty thousand followers. If one percent of those followers saw that tweet in time to matter, that's 400 people. If one fortieth of those who saw it actually clicked thru to Kickstarter, and hadn't pledged yet and did so (or upped an existing pledge because MG reminded them, whatever) then that would be enough to make a difference.

Kickstarter is not a store. Kickstarter is for giving people money to make something happen, that otherwise wouldn't happen at all. People seem to have this idea that VN companies are rolling in the dough. They're not. Their products are heavily pirated but seldom purchased, and yet the products are expensive to product (good translations cost money, the licenses cost money). I mean, look at this project. Sol Press is saying 'we can't commit to licensing these games without Kickstarting them, because it is too much for us'. (I.e. doing it without Kickstarter would take forever and/or threaten to bankrupt the company.)

I don't remember too much completely insane H-scenes in VNs (because I go for mostly vanilla anyway), but I do remember the movie A History of Violence, and there's a part in it where something happens (don't remember what, exactly) and the guy's all wound up so he grabs his wife close, and they do it on the stairs. Really? On the stairs? That would be incredibly painful.

It ultimately falls apart, in my opinion. Characters behaving in irrational ways because otherwise the story doesn't work. The latter half seems to be at war with the themes the first half wants to talk about. But it is a very interesting read until that happens. (I find the h-scenes to be utterly revolting, but I'm not into that kind of thing. At all.)

No, it isn't. It's roughly in line with what it's worth, considering that this game probably sold tens of thousands of units in Japan, and probably cost at least two or three hundred thousand dollars to make.

They have to have negotiated SOMETHING with Favorite. Sol Press needs to guarantee they can deliver every one of their Kickstarter promistes. You're right, they probably haven't paid for the licenses yet, but they have to have a deal inked out ready to be signed as soon as the KS is successful. You can't do a Kickstarter and then negotiate rights. That leads to fiascos like this. Also, don't expect the twenty one grand to be all that Favorite expects to get paid. That is probably the minimum guarantee. In other words - the contract probably specifies royalties per unit sold, with a guaranteed up-front minimum payment of $21,250. (Sol Press doesn't actually pay any royalties until they sell enough copies to generate more than $20K in royalty payments.)

? The definition of 'good enough' is that it is... good enough. So while I appreciate time and effort spent going above and beyond to do excellent work, 'good enough' is perfectly acceptable. That's what it means. Where it gets weird is that 'good enough' changes over time. Standards change. Work that was 'good enough' for video game translations in the late 90's / early 2000's will generally not pass today's minimum standards. Mostly, it doesn't qualify as 'good enough' anymore. Companies have raised the bar over time to bring the average up enough that people demand better. And that is the real threat here: The VN scene still does bad enough business that SakuraGame's business model - 'burn the forest down and profit off the ashes' - probably provides a comparable profit to doing things right. Some number of companies will look at the foreign 'market', see it an order of magnitude smaller than the Japanese market (even though Japan has shrunk so much since the heyday 10 years ago or so), and not care enough to pay attention and just sign with SakuraGame because they offered more money or it's easier. Just like normal video games moved the bar up, but there's NISA and Tecmo Koei trying to drag it back down - the real threat is lowering the bar, so 'good enough' starts including bad work.

Some of these are definitely more cliched than others. Some might be a bit more cliched than you would like, but I thought they're all fairly well developed: Ever 17. Root Double. Fruit of Grisaia. I imagine Dies Irae probable qualifies (but I haven't gotten past the prologue). I expect that I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream is pretty good (but I haven't played it yet). Littlewitch Romanesque. Eien no Aselia. Demonbane. Gahkthun. Steins;Gate. Dengeki Stryker. Tokyo Babel. Shadows of Pygmalion. Utawarerumono. 999/VLR. And finally (yes I'm serious) Funbag Fantasy.

Both aspects of the OP are correct. VNs are growing in the West. And they still do pretty crappy numbers. Eight years ago, MangaGamer removed the voices from Koihime because they were too expensive to license. They said they'd get added back when the title sold 2K copies. That did eventually happen, a year or so later. After MG decided to cheat a little bit and count the first print run of the hard copy as 'units sold' (they didn't want to print voiceless copies). That is ... terrible performance. But it was enough to make the title one of MangaGamer's most successful. VNs sell so poorly that even a huge improvement still leaves them pretty awful.

No, it probably wouldn't. It would sell a lot better than it did back in 2011, that's for sure. (Heck, I believe Nutaku and Fakku report it as selling very well for them.) But the game sold so poorly that it could do several times what it sold before and still not even get close to what it probably sold in 2007 in Japan. In 2007 the market was a lot bigger and it was the #3 game in the sales rankings that year. There are a few VNs that have sold well: https://old.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/8wpse6/with_the_recent_leak_of_steam_sales_figures_heres/ But the vast majority sell a few thousand units. Only a very few very successful titles have sold more. By and large, people don't buy VNs, they steal them.