Infernoplex

Even though I knew about VNDB since like back in 2010, I had started using it only recently, somewhere in the late 2015/beginning of 2016. I am still learning about it and I have even dedicated some time on editing tags and other related info as character traits and so on for every visual novel that I read at the time. I have stumbled upon this thread some time ago and recently decided to check it out again and I have even learned some new things about it. With all of that said, I have created this thread in hopes of finding some more answers on some of the questions that have been on my mind for some time now. There should be people on this forum that know more about this then I do. I hope I am not posting in the wrong section, VNDB Tips n' Tricks thread was also posted here so I think it is the right place for these questions (if not, mods should move it where it's appropriate). So here are the questions: For every VN that I have read in the past year, I have given it a rating based on my opinion and experience of it. So far, I have always been in favour of giving only whole integer numbers with no decimal points since I really hated giving numbers like "7.5" and similiar, I kind of didn't like the option of giving floating point numbers as a rating and I tried to avoid fractions as much as possible since I didn't consider them as real ratings. That was only recently until I have read Edelweiss and thought in myself how I cannot really rate it good enough with integer numbers because I don't like giving it a 7 nor do I like giving it an 8. And so I was on the edge and finally succumbed to giving it a fractional "7.5". That also prompted me to revisit some other VNs I have read earlier and give them fractional ratings too because that's closer to how I really felt about these titles. Now my question here is how are these fractional ratings taken inside the statistics ("vote stats" on every VN page)? Are they taken with a lower or a higher mark? For example, if I rate something as 7.2, is it taken as a 7 or as an 8? Same question for 7.7 and similiar. How does it take 7.5? Is it taken as a both a 7 and an 8? I don't really care that much about this, I am just curious on how this part of it works (I tried figuring it out on my own, but I think my browser is bugging so I can't confirm how the statistics changed based on my input); This is also one of the questions that sparked my curiousity ... How is VNDB funded? O_O That's a thought I had in my mind for several months now and only now I decided to ask if somebody knows how. I have disabled adblock for VNDB and I still don't see any ads on it. I also don't see anywhere a donation tab. So I am rather curious about it, who funds VNDB? It seems like a very good visual novel database that's operated by a community dedicated to visual novels and I am rather curious on how do they pay their montly hosting costs. I am not sure but I have been paying attention lately and I have noticed this everytime I open the homepage of VNDB: Is VNDB just a Wikipedia offspring? I didn't think about it earlier but I have noticed this only recently and I thought in myself how VNDB really does function similiar to Wikipedia (i.e. random people can edit content). But it has its own style and presentation, when I look at it like this, it has a form of an entire website, I never thought of Wikipedia when I was looking at VNDB like this. Final question ... Am I able to make myself a custom theme on VNDB? I have recently discovered the option to change the theme of VNDB style and I picked "Tsukihime" but below down I see "Additional CSS" ... I know CSS is related to HTML and so I was thinking if it's possible to code myself a totally different style and presentation on VNDB? xD What's the use of "Additional CSS"? ... If it's possible I might want to create myself a totally different style, that would be good usage of my Web Designer course that I am studying at my school

Yeah, I knew it was for one of the consoles, I wasn't sure which one I don't have a PSP anymore, I am not really a console gamer so I didn't need it. I am not even a heavy PC gamer considering that I mostly play casual games and visual novels ... Symphonia is the first Tales game I am playing and it got me pretty hooked on I mean, the story itself so far isn't very good but man, I like the combat system! It isn't turn-based like in some other games, I like this real-time approach and I have heard that Zestiria is even better since it's in 3D, but I am not going to play it until I finish Symphonia (right now I am still on the first map, I have seen the game features two big maps xD) ... I like it so far, it's definitively a good experience ...

ToX isn't available on PC so I can't play it because I don't have any consoles (I think Xilia is for Xbox only?) ... I am playing the recently Steam ported versions of "Tales of Symphonia" and I am planning on playing Zestiria later on aswell as Berseria if and when it gets ported too (last I heard, it will happen in 2017) ... But currently I am in visual novels, so I am switching between playing JRPG games and reading VNs As you could have guessed, I like to consume Japanese-related games (and sometimes I watch anime too, but I am no otaku by any means, more like a casual )

Many people from Germany are lately signing up on Fuwa Nevermind, welcome and hope you enjoy your stay here By the way, I am also a fan of the "Tales of - " series, playing "Tales of Symphonia" when I have the time

Okay, I just saw this one, a real loli VN

@Tay should fix the link, it appears this is the right one: http://fuwanovel.net/category/vnts-latest/

Well, she isn't that short xD In CGs in-game, she looks tall enough but for some reason the other characters in Edelweiss think of her as a loli and act towards her like she is a loli kawaii type of character, but her looks aren't that loli-esque and I agree that she kind of isn't really a loli. Yeah, it definitively looks like that, fake lolis vs real lolis is what's going on

An interesting thread This is one of the aspects of the VNs that I consider very important and I tend to remember VNs that have very good soundtracks. For example, one of the reasons I think I liked Bible Black very much was due to its OST that managed to make me excited enough for what's about to happen next, that music itself made me interested into the plot more, maybe even more than the H-scenes itself, it felt so good to listen to the music and see all that was about to happen badly for the protagonist It's definitively one of the VNs in which I encountered good use of the music to support the setting ... I didn't read that many VNs as of yet but from all those that I have read so far, I will pick one title that I consider to have had the best soundtrack of all of them and that is definitively Notch - The Innocent LunA ... Too bad the VN itself had a kind of a bad translation from Chinese into English and it fell so flat on its face with the badly designed story (I will be honest, it had a good potential) which is very sad because the soundtrack was definitively something else! I have grabbed the music files from the game before uninstalling it and to this day I am still listening to it because it's simply one of the best soundtracks in a VN that I have heard so far. More than half of the soundtrack files I considered very good and I love to listen to it outside of the VN. I can't link any of it here because it seems nobody uploaded it on Youtube so far but I will link the OP from the game:

I am no big fan of X-Men but this soundtrack from the trailer is what I have been listening for an entire month right now:

The VN I am reading right now has one of the main heroines that kind of resembles a loli, at least in the VN she appears to be kind of a loli type of a character and I think of her as a loli Here is she, does it look loli enough for you? xD

I have already seen how this type of situations sometimes ends ... i.e. piracy ...

There's one site I use for streaming and it's pretty famous ... But I don't know if I may link it here so I will send you a PM instead.

Now that's a real plot twist!

Ahaha, yeah, I know, it was just for my previous post because I saw you also mentioned it in your review so I guessed you are already familiar with Bible Black It was just for comparison purposes This is an interesting paragraph for me ... It seems we both had our first experiences of the VN medium reading the same title but maybe unsurprisingly at the end we had a different opinion of it (unsurprisingly - because BB is not exactly considered to be a very good introduction to the medium and it falls in the category of "maybe you will like it if you are into that, that and that") ... For me it was a good introduction because it was something that perfectly matched my mood at that time (I was in middle school and several coincidences made BB a very interesting VN for me) ... Looking at it now, if you read this in 2011, that means you were 33 years old back then and I can definitively see maybe why this title wasn't that much appealing to you ... It's not exactly a VN liked by everyone, some people like me considered it to be very good and some people consider it to be a rather shitty nukige with lots of mindless rape-fest ... I am not going to go into full details here, I have posted several of my review-opinions in the comments on this forum and I could look for them if you want And I am open on discussions about it aswell as anything that we both read (there isn't much on my list because I am a very slow passionate reader, you can check out my VNDB but it's a pretty poor list right now) ... Oh, you are definitively right about that, VNs are an interesting storytelling medium Albeit many of these Japanese VNs simply aren't well made in literary aspect which is kind of a shame ... true, there are some interesting titles in that sense but the great amount of them just aren't that well written ... And there's also the problem of the translation, from Japanese into English, there's always bound some meanings to be lost in the translation so I can't really judge the literary aspect of the VN unless I read it in its original form ... As for FF, I have only played some older FF games like FF VII and VIII (I do have plans to start playing some of these freshly PC ported older FFs that are now on Steam sometimes in the future) ... As for Chrono-Trigger, I don't think I will play it unless it comes to PC one day (as you might be guessing right now, I am a PC guy xD I had several consoles earlier but I sold them all at the end) ... I am right now into Tales of Symphonia, that's something I am playing when I have the time and I am also intending on playing Tales of Zestiria and The Legend of Heroes Those are some of the JRPGs that I am into right now ... It's no wonder you are mentioning the narrative perspective, that's something the JRPGs are known for There's that game developer on Youtube that made very good explanation on differences between JRPGs and western RPGs (I happened to like it how he presented it ) ... As for walkthroughs, I do agree on the notion that when you are stuck in some game you should use one but I personally use it only as a last-stand, albeit I agree there are games out there that simply must be played with a walkthrough (and I happen to approve of it in some games but mostly I try to avoid it if I can help it) ... Speaking of the story aspected games, since I am noticing you are into that, do you happen to like Telltale Series Games? xD Have you ever played any? I remember playing a lot of mouse-and-click advanture games (like Sam & Max for example) before starting VNs and I happened to like it very much at that time because I am also a story-type fanatic Saya no Uta is very good in that aspect from what I have heard but I haven't yet read it so I can't say much about it I know Kara no Shoujo is also supposedly very dark but I can't confirm for it either because I haven't yet read it ... And, oh yeah, Higurashi! (as you guess - I didn't read it ... BUT I DID WATCH THE ANIME OF IT XDDD And if the VN is anything like the anime, then it should be good I guess ) Yeah, I guessed good then, it was a typo on your blog I have heard pretty good stuff about YU-NO but sadly I can't read it really ... I tried several months ago and just couldn't make myself play it, that DOS-type interface and everything just puts me off and after 2-3 hours I just couldn't bear to read it anymore ... And that HUUUGEEEE walkthrough for it O___O ... No, thanks, I believe it's a very good classic VN but I just cannot go through it and that's the only VN I fully dropped from the beginning ... For that time it probably was I was speaking of hentai porn aspect, not in general porn aspect, I am not really sure how many people find hentai VNs to be fappable at all (I'll be honest here and say that there are several VNs that I have read that I considered to be fappable xD)

First of all, welcome to Fuwa and I hope you like it here Though, I need to tell you something rather important right now ... I don't think you should really do any translations as of the moment, here we already had several huge discussions about fan-translating and related matters and since you are actually French, you would had to translate firstly from Japanese to French and then from French to English which is VERY HARD in my opinion, especially for beginners ... Don't take me the wrong way, I am all up for and I very much do support fan-TL but there was many discussions on this forum about quality of fan-TLd VNs ... I am telling you this as someone who is also wanting to translate something one day, but until I am satisfied with my knowledge of Japanese, I am not going to do any kind of translating ...

Well, hello there, dear oldtimer You'd be surprised how much of you older guys are into anime and VNs ... I don't find those two hobbies to be age-restricted so you have no reason to feel "too old" in order to enjoy any of them ... While that is true, that generally younger people are into these mediums, I think that from my experience there's a huge matter of chance when it comes to age statistics in anime, manga and VN groups ... in my country, the most prominent fan-organization that deals with anything Japanese (anime, Japanese culture, etc.) consists of many different age-groups and the leaders of that organization are all 30+ who mostly finished Japanese-related studies and/or are heavily involved into promoting anything Japanese. Also, a lot of members are in the age group of between 25-35, I think that almost half of the entire group are all 30+ so it's a matter of chance will the anime group you are joining have more or less of that age group. I personally don't think it's awkward when people 40+ enjoy anime because I simply don't find it to be age-restricting as I already said. Some of the best anime titles (mostly oldies) can be enjoyed by all age-groups ... Since I am also planning to start up a blog one day, I was kind of curious about your Wordpress blog so I decided to check it out since you linked it here ... From it I have learned you are also into JRPGs which is very much what I kind of expected since usually anime and VN fans also like JRPGs. And I am also in that group I think that exposure to anime made me a big fan of 2D, 2.5D, 3D Fighting Games aswell as JRPG type of games (and later on, also a fan of VNs) ... I was kind of interested into the matter but it seems you didn't yet post any opinion on any of the JRPGs so I decided to read your reviews about Divi-Dead (it's the only title I know of amongst these 4 you wrote about, I didn't read .Moon, Planetarian nor Eve) ... One word of advice, if you intend on reading a lot of VNs in your free time (when you are not on the job and have spare time), a great idea is to make a VNDB account ... When I first started reading VNs (back in 2010), I didn't know I was going to be pulled into it that much and never bothered to create an account there but as soon as I returned back to that hobby I discovered how useful VNDB really is for me, it is definitively worth it to have kind of a backlog of what you read already and it's a great tool for searching for new VNs because of tags, language and other filters available ... Anyways, I wanted to leave a reply on the Divi-Dead review but since you split it into two (1,2) I will post my comments here for both of them: Ku-No? Is that an anime or a VN? Did you mean YU-NO? I know of a VN by that name which fits in the description of an older VN (considered a classis aswell) ... I can pretty much agree with this to some degree, the entire beginning is kind of very slow paced and very boring at times, I remember being annoyed by the entire map system in this VN and having to click 100 times on all the same places until the time and day progressed further ... I will have to be honest here and say that this is kind of true because I did find something interesting in the plot after like a lot of crawling through the questionably translated text and some rather funny H-scenes I loved the setting and the occult theme behind it because I love mysteries and suspense, but my final opinion on this VN is that it didn't deliver my expectations at the end ... And I was very confused at some of the stuff that happened later on and I've discovered that there were some plot developments lost in the translation (I kind of noticed that translation seemed off at times already) ... My memory of Divi Dead has kind of faded right now (I've read it like in 2011 I think) and I don't remember the scenes with mysterious scent but I do remember some fantasy black magic stuff aswell as badly scened rituals at the end ... But I do have a very good memory of Bible Black (my first read VN that also got me into the genre itself) and the black magic in it (the whole occult theme of it) and comparing them now, my opinion is that Bible Black has done it 10 times better even though BB is considered a nukige unlike Divi-Dead which tries to have some kind of a good occult mystery plot ... Heck, I even enjoyed the plot (if one could say that it exists) of BB more than I enjoyed Divi-Dead (hence the reason why I rated Bible Black pretty big on my list because I love the VNs who can be both a good nukige and good in plot-wise sense), and I could go into analysis of why do I feel like that about it ... And here we come to one of the reasons why I didn't like Divi-Dead ... If I have to use a walkthrough just in order to play the VN normally, then that's a minus in my opinion, whenever I play or read something, I tend to play it without any walkthroughs and if a game requires one just in order to be playable, than I am better off not reading that VN at all ... When I played Divi-Dead, my first ending was I think the "A" ending (if I remember correctly, it has A, B, C endings and all 2x times) ... At the end I didn't finish off all the endings, I simply couldn't torture myself anymore with it and at the end I had a pretty low opinion of Divi-Dead ... Well, I guess you could say that for that time the artwork really was terrific but I didn't find it that amazing really ... BB for example has aged very well in my opinion and I found it more interesting than the art in Divi-Dead though I am aware that Divi-Dead is older than BB ... Though I guess you could say that the delicate scenes (bloody, ritual, not H-scenes) were done very good in DD (for that time). This is true and that's why my favourite nukiges are the ones that can provide both the good story and good H-scenes (story-wise VNs usually have sex as a means to conclude the story at the end, not as a way to make progress) ... It's obvious already that I am kind of a BB fan and that I consider it to be a nukige that has somewhat connectable H-scenes which fit in the setting of the VN, for some reason I didn't find H-scenes in it to be forcable like in some other VNs, I know it has lots of rape and some rather fetishy stuff but all in all, it's what I consider to be a good nukige. Unlike Divi-Dead which has sex scenes but I found them rather to be either boring or funny (I remember having a laugh at some of these H-scenes in DD, like the librarian scene and some others, comedy gold XD) ... About the dismembered part - you ain't seen nothing yet, try reading a guro type of VN (I agree, it's not fappable) ... As for the forcible part, you are talking about rape I guess and I have to say that so far the only VN where I was okay with rape was Bible Black ... Later on when I read some other titles like Sensei 2, My Sex Slave is a Classmate and some others, I found rape to be quite unappealing in those VNs, it just isn't on the level of BB ... At the end, I don't think I understood much about Divi-Dead, there are some very good plot twists at the very end that I am not going to spoil here but overall some things were left unexplained (I forgot now which, I read it long ago) and the sex scenes didn't really mean much to me here, I didn't even find them as a way to advance the plot, I remember being quite surprised how sudden some of these scenes were, granted - there were some that fitted perfectly but some of them just didn't stood out for me ... This is the best paragraph of all, I agree with this fully, now you reminded me why I never finished all the routes xD ... That's one of the reasons why I decided to read explanations on the Internet after finishing two routes ... I just couldn't play it anymore, everything about Divi-Dead was kind of not meeting my expectations ... And even though I am a completionist I just couldn't finish it after all those hours spent trying to get it till the end xD ... Your conclusion remarks are very true ("could-have-been") and that's similiar to what I am thinking of it. Though I can't agree with the last part: I didn't find any of the scenes to be fappable, pretty much not a VN I'd read for titillation. Kind of a long post, sorry I wanted to give some feedback for one of your reviews

Welcome to Fuwa, fellow writer

I recognize this one, it's that chick from Owari no Seraph

Check this thread:

Interesting question ... Among the small number of VNs that I have read so far (max 20), the breaking of the 4th wall (kind of, not in the way you are looking for) happened like only in two VNs (I/O Revision II in some occations and Notch: The Innocent LunA had some kind of 4th wall breaking near the end of the VN) ... But all in all, I think I dislike that trope, it breaks immersion for me sometimes and it usually isn't executed very well so I have yet to find a VN in which I will like it to the fullest ... I think I am more into the unreliable narrator trope than this

They are the same, nothing was censored on Steam if I remember correctly.

I am aware of their twitter accounts, I do follow doddler, kouryuu and some others but I liked the convenience of ask.fm Yeah, I have found individual ask.fm accounts easily, thanks for the suggestion, I actually had it bookmarked for some time, this is where I am going to follow them now ...

MG had ask.fm for a long time ... I remember it from like 2013 I think ... I could be wrong though xD But I do know that they had it for quite a long time. I find it hard to believe that ask.fm banned them because of MG's business. Even if that's the case, ask.fm really needed a lot of time to figure it out then xD Edit: Okay, I decided to check ask.fm's guidelines and their terms and from what I see here, I am guessing MG got suspended because of a possible adult-rated photo ... Here's an excerpt I find interesting: I am guessing somebody asked MG's something about some of their VNs and either the asker or MG posted a link to a 18+ rated image and then somebody else (or a rogue asker xD) reported it and then MG got suspended ... Makes sense to me ... But I am still kind of sad for that, I kind of followed MG's ask.fm from time to time ...

I wanted to visit MangaGamer's ask.fm a moment ago and suddenly I discovered that it's basically gone O____O ... This was the link for MG's account: http://ask.fm/MangaGamerStaff ... What I see when I visit that link is this: So what's going on O____O ... Why did MG got banned from ask.fm? They weren't posting anything bad from what I know and most of the questions and answers were informative. It's a shame all of that is gone now ...

I am kind of secretly hoping that they are just trolling with the background picture and the whole "It's another Grisaia" thing and just create a new IP ... That's just my optimism speaking out from me