Plk_Lesiak

I think that worldbuilding in most media has two main challenges and how they deal with them decides whether I'd consider them successful. The first is keeping the world believable and consistent – you'll notice that most media, especially the relatively short-form ones such as movies and animation, don't really give a shit about this aspect. The worlds they create won't survive any kind of deeper scrutiny and they rely a lot on the suspension of disbelief and the watchers/readers not caring about smaller details. Also, if something is made into a longer series, there's a good chance it will destroy its own lore and rules of its world for the sake of convenience – look at Mass Effect for example, with the third part ignoring tons of pre-established events and lore. Or the new Star Wars trilogy for some extreme self-mutilation of a fictional universe. Thus, actual effort being put into creating a consistent world is something I very much appretiate. The second part is the delivery of the information, which in literature and VNs has a unique risk of turning into massive infodumps – after all, you have all the time in the world to throw in a few tomes of encyclopedia between the story events to make sure the player doesn't get lost. And If the writers really suck, it might also become the Awkward Expository DialogueTM, which can easily become even more unreadable than plain infodumps. Building up your fictional world without using either of those two "techniques", but through natural-feeling events and conversations is hard, but definitely most satisfying. And having said all this, one game that I think did some really cool stuff in this regard and that will not get brought up by anyone else is Sable's Grimoire. It's all about worldbuilding and does its best to convey it all through the protagonist's and heroines' stories, rather than just bombarding you with textbook-like excerpts. And it has some really, really cool elements to its modern-fantasy setting.

Ds-sans is a British VN developer whose work I've been following since the times I started writing my blog, first being charmed by his free romance game Sounds of Her Love, (check out my review of it here). Released on Steam March 2017, this very tame and heartwarming, small love story was extremely by-the-numbers and rather cliched, but stood out through its solid execution and likeable heroine. Later, I’ve checked out this author’s first VN, Lost Impressions, which also proved enjoyable despite being something of a mess visually and including edgy story elements typical for many beginner VN writers – a rather standard amateur project, but showing traces of genuine talent. As you can imagine, I was quite interested in reading ds-sans’ first commercial VN, Chemically Bonded, announced and successfully crowdfunded in late 2017. It promised to continue the wholesome, romantic climate of Sounds of Her Love, but with a more in-depth, branching story and better production values – pretty much a product catered exactly to someone like me, who enjoys fluffy slice-of-life content in VNs over pretty much everything else. After a full year of delays, the game finally came out on November 2019, proving to be… Very much a mixed bag. But, what could go wrong with a concept this straightforward and such a promising background? Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

So, it looks I can never get enough of Leo Ieiri's voice. This song is pretty cool too... Just why it's not on Spotify? Edit: And something a bit more serious. :3

Well, I liked the side romance too, but the adventure part... Maybe it's just not what I want from a VN, but the PG-rated fantasy action felt way too sanitized and by-the-numbers. In like one short moment it created any feeling of danger and never showed anything cool when it goes to the fights or challenges. The popcultural referenced had a subtlety of a sledgehammer, and still are one of the few things I remembered from the whole VN, through the virtue of being obnoxious. It was quite frankly the most narratively-empty VN I've ever read outside of the "very short" category, although I can see someone enjoying it for the chill climate and the aesthetic.

So, as we're still in the time of yearly recollections and were talking recently about VNs we liked the most, what are the titles that crushed your hopes and dreams? Which ones were not plain bad, but rather fell short of your's and everyone else's expectations, to the point of turning your hearts into an emotionless void? For me, the answer is pretty simple: Crystalline and (sorry @ds-sans :() Chemically Bonded. Both games were really well-produced visually and had good sound designs, but absolutely fell apart when it goes to telling a story. The main difference between them is that while Crystalline was absolutely devoid of meaningful plot and tension, Chemically Bonded made a few bizarre missteps with its writing and structure of the story, breaking the flow of the romance, particularly in the tsundere heroine's route. Neither were anywhere close to being among worst EVNs of the year, but definitely had most wasted potential. So, what are your guys' greatest regrets of 2019 in VN form? :3

Scanning through my VNDB I realized how few fresh releases I actually read in 2019... From the few I can actually talk about, Heart of the Woods and The Language of Love would be my favourites. And if I had to choose one favourite (as opposed to "the best VN"), it would be... The Language of Love. It just resonated with me in multiple ways and did the thing ebi-hime does best: conveying emotions and themes that are more or less absent from your typical visual novel storytelling.

Or a dozen times, if we count this thread. '^^ Indeed, this game looks pretty crazy. Also quite incomprehensible at first glance... If it doesn't force you to play everyday though, it's already a lot better than pretty much all mobage. I genuinely miss Azur Lane and my waifu armada, but I definitely couldn't keep up with the daily chores forever. They were still fun most of the time, but it's very liberating to not check the game every 10 mins. I`ve realized that while it didn't look very high-maintenance, I couldn't help but minmax it all the time and I ended up spending much of my free time on it. Which wouldn't be that much of a problem if there wasn't other stuff I really wanted to keep working on and which ultimately is a bit more meaningful than marrying warships. Even extremely cute, well designed warships... Tirpitz... :'( I also don't regret the $50 I' be spent on it in 4 months, it was pretty proportional to the enjoyment factor I've got from it. I'm not even buying VNs lately, with just how much of them I have in my backlog and how many still get sent to me for review... In the end, though, I always feel that moments when I cut down on gaming are my better ones. If I can just not go back to games when I'm really down/demotivated...

The Initial D marathon still going on...

Welcome to Fuwa! Sadly, I wouldn't get my hopes too high about finding translators, not many people with that kind of skill and free time are left in the community. Still, I wish you luck and in the meantime, don't be shy to join discussions etc.

Right, now I fully feel what you meant back then, having a direct comparison with Eurobeat. ^^ BTW, do you think this girls is more popular in Japan? Her stuff seems decently-produced, but her YouTube and Spotify presence is at the levels of my gf's middle school friend who suddenly started making electronic music and putting it on the internet for shits and giggles. ;p In other news, holy crap, 90's... Edit: And holy crap, what is this insanity? They're actually performing!

Right, it's pretty easy to feel that connection. But the insane beats and the bizarre Japanese/English/Italian mix in many of these songs... It ends up feeling pretty unique too. And those awesome stage names like MEGA NRG MAN (all caps).

I'm slowly finishing Chemically Bonded while listening to the Initial D soundtrack... Eurobeat is just so dumb and over the top, I kind of can't help but enjoy it.

They definitely can, if you make them.

Why read it? Buy a cat and you can live it out yourself. I recommend a persian, those are some lazy, demanding fucks. Clear proofs of human slavery to house pets.

Maybe we'll get a proper Fate/Stay Night remake with a Western release. In like 15 years. 8-10 years after they finally finish the Tsukihime one.

Today I wanted to talk a bit about an interesting project, and one that provided me with a unique opportunity to, for the first time, act as a proof-reader and do minor editing for a sizeable VN. Because of this personal involvement, this won’t be a full-on review, but more of a loose rant, highlighting both the worthwhile aspects of the game and my somewhat-peculiar experience with it. The VN in question, Bewitched is indeed a rather interesting one, as all games by Graven Visual Novels are – just as they are weighted down by extremely awkward translations from Russian and inherent flaws of their author’s prose. This time, however, the developer made their first attempt to work on properly polishing the game’s English script with the help of a few volunteers (including my gloriously dyslectic person). This move was quite likely inspired by the discussions I had with them regarding their previous projects and the problems with their English versions. If my involvement in the EVN scene ever made a tangible difference, this is the most concrete example of it, and I hope you’ll be willing to join me as I briefly explore what that difference actually is… Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

Well, when you get into this type of arguments online, there's a very good chance that at least some participants will be extremely unreasonable. In the end, I've learned to treat these discussions more as opportunities to train rhetorics and organize my thoughts on certain issues rather than trying to convince anyone. Although, I still end up getting too-engrossed in the arguments and getting disturbed by people's insane worldviews from time to time. If I didn't produce some level of distance and ability to switch from serious talk to trolling when no discussion can be done any more, I'd go insane myself by this point. Well, that sounds like a healthy thing to do, not sociopathic at all. Oh, I guess that was about flamewars. Right... Well, sometimes it's fun to join, as long as you're aware what you're getting into. There's still a chance to learn something and test your own convictions against people's critique, which is worth doing from time to time. If you're not completely disinterested, that is. :>

Congrats! ^^ So... Which EVN company is the biggest? PixelFade? Or is that one Canadian...?

Confession 1: For the 80th time I got rid of all the mobage and generally non-VN games I was playing and I'm trying to get my daily routine back in order. One day it will work, I'm sure... Confession 2: After two days of fighting on the frontlines of an intense flamewar, I got myself banned (temporarily) from the Libyan Civil War subreddit. There's a chance it's my first ban ever on a discussion board/forums of any sorts. At least, I can't think of another one and in the past, I would be pretty shaken by such a thing. In this case, I'm kind of glad, because I should've stopped posting there a lot earlier... I guess I just really don't like Erdogan and everything associated with him...

Well, due to my horrible taste I don't mind tsunderes that switch between the modes in a somewhat predictable and logical pattern. Here we have the case of a girl that switches between very distinctive abusive, boastful and flustered modes literally every other sentence, turning most of her dialogue into a tone-deaf mess. Normal tsundereness seems rather inoffensive in comparison.

Well, as a start, welcome to Fuwa! You're asking a lot of difficult questions and I think most of those only you can answer. However, in my opinion, the thing even VN should start with is a script. Depending on what kind of story you're trying to tell, you might need very different types and quantities of art, and its quality will have different importance. You always want your game to look great, but if it's a serious, down-to-Earth drama, you can probably focus more on the quality of the intrigue. If it's an adventure story or romance, and especially if you want to sell it, you probably want it to be gorgeous. I've recently read a few pieces of interactive fiction, with only simple backgrounds and music to accompany the text and they were quite brilliant, but probably not the most commercially-viable projects if someone wanted to monetize them. With the next step, I have actually no experience with that. I can only say what I hear VN developers saying and the consensus seems to be that Ren'Py is the most versatile engine for this types of games and for the reader, it by default offers all the quality-of-life features one would want. All three you mentioned are ok though, just don't make your VN in Unity, those literally give me nightmares, particularly if they have branching paths and I want to re-read them a few times without a proper skip-read function. Also, you're likely to get more meaningful feedback on the Lemma Soft Forums – it's a community mostly for Ren'Py developers, but it's probably the biggest gathering of people involved in the EVN scene on the production side of things.

So, as I'm done healing from the worst alcohol poisoning of my life (I don't think I'll be able to look at vodka again without thinking "barfing", which is probably a good thing anyway...), I've got back to reading VNs, particularly Chemically Bonded... And damn, I can't say I like much about it so far. While I liked ds-sans' writing in his previous two games, even though the stories were very simple, there's something fundamentally broken with how it flows in this one. The inner monologues are both benign and extremely bloated. The characters act in an unnatural way that is hard to look past, particularly the Tsundere heroine, who juggles personas in such a speed that she feels like an insane person more than anything else. The voice acting for the shy heroine is also just... Weird. She sounds more like a small child than like a somewhat-cheerful and sharp high schooler. I also just reached the first really tense scene in the game and the music went so over-the-top-dramatic that it genuinely kept distracting me... I even tried re-reading the opening sequences, to make sure that it wasn't just my mood spoiling the experience or something like that... And nope, it felt just the same. Unless something changes soon, it's going to be one sad review...

First Re;Zero was so nerve-wracking for me that I don't think I'll risk watching the second season. I also still utterly hate Subaru, for me he's an unholy hybrid of a complete loser and Gary Stu, circulating between the two depending on what the plot requires. The Madoka spin-off looks cool, but I didn't see the original yet... I'll probably watch Infinite Dendrogram, because who doesn't need more SAO wannabes in their lives. Rikekoi could be fun for me, as it has the elements I generally like in RomComs (clear main couple and lot of interactions between them), but it also looks like a much poorer version of Kaguya-sama and might end up being obnoxious AF. Not sure about anything else yet...

Happy New Year! May the twenties be kind to us all.

I've heard about the fan VN... If I go for the original, I'll probably watch a playthrough – if I remember well, it's one of the few high-profile games Western with genuine f/f romance. It would even be a nice topic for a blog post, but I'm not sure I'd be up for buying it and bothering with puzzles right now... With the Purist Mod, you can also just skip through the first three arcs and go straight to the Monika one. It's cheesy AF, but not irritating in the way previous three are. I'm also on reading shorter/easier VNs at the moment. Otherwise I would be completely stuck with no motivation to read anything...