Plk_Lesiak

Does this count?

Happy Birthday to Eclipsed! I hope I'll see the day when some of the mods here rise from the dead and I'll get to know them better.

I've finished playing Sakura Dungeon and I'm... Sad. I mean, not because the game was that bad, exactly because it wasn't. The design on the RPG elements was very clean, it never felt overly grindy or boring. It had a great, relaxing soundtrack. The protagonist was really interesting - I mean, you really don't often see the story from the perspective of a centuries-old fox spirit, it wasn't an obvious choice and made the whole thing much more interesting than what we usually get in this kind of stories. The writing was rather bland and tropy, but it could've been much worse. The obnoxious, everpresent fanservice was obviously there, but I can accept it as a part of the formula, knowing that many people actually enjoy it. My point is, it's clear to me that Winged Cloud can make decent games. They just don't give a shit, so they don't even try. And, obviously, their audience reinforces this by buying the most absurd crap (200k+ copies sold of Sakura Beach 2, WTF???) - why bother making one Dungeon and try selling it for 20$ when with the same budget you can produce 4-5 short, shitty VNs, sell them 10$ each and make more money...

Note: While I didn't plan on tackling Japanese-produced OELVNs on this blog, this title is a perfect representation of mobile game market's business practices implemented in a VN and for this reason was worth a closer look. More than by itself, it's interesting as a negative example of scammy policies that aren't in any way endemic to JP developers and are sadly used by many different companies with various backgrounds. I don’t think many people have any doubts about how horrible the mobile game market is nowadays, both when it goes to quality and dominating business models. Generic, borderline plagiaristic games, ridden with pay-to-win mechanics and exploitative microtransaction systems are a sad standard in most genres popular on smartphones and tablets, swarming the AppStore and Google Play in a way that makes it nearly impossible to find actual quality products just by browsing these storefronts. Considering the absurdly-high revenue that many mobile games bring their developers, often through relatively small investments, it shouldn’t be surprising that the plague of exploitative business models dominating the Android and iOS market would find its way into the world of visual novels. Still, how can you make an ultimately single-player, story-driven formula “pay-to-win”? Moe! Ninja Girls, a mobile OELVN produced for the western markets by a Japanese company NTT Solmare inc. shows that it’s absolutely possible to turn a text adventure with anime drawings into one of the most predatory, scammy games available on mobile. Read the full article at evnchronicles.blogspot.com

I'll remember that then. :] That avatar by the way, that's some drastic change of tone. ^^

I haven't really played through those yet, but I think protagonists in major fighting VNs are rarely useless, for obvious reasons. So I guess something like Fate/Stay Night or Dies Irae could be a good choice for you? Can someone more knowledgeable confirm?

If it didn't die yet it'll be fine, dogs shouldn't eat it, but unless they get an alergic reaction right away (and you'd notice it) nothing horrible should happen.

Is your dog a vampire?

My dog once ate some korean beef stew and got swollen like a pufferfish. Had to take him to a vet but he definitely didn't die (or get discouraged from sneaking onto the table in the dining room and stealing food from there).

Well, if you look what sells best in the West (Nekopara, Sakura games etc) I think most people buy VNs for porn and fanservice. Of course, we can argue if those people are actually interested in VNs apart from grabbing one or two as fapping material, but in the end if they're more numerous and easy to bait with "sexy" stuff, they'll matter much more than any dedicated, but small niche audience. And with people that actually dislike hentai and still bother to read VNs a lot... I'm pretty sure I'm one of fairly few - from what I've observed around here it's rather those enjoying h-content that talk less about it.

Very cool podcast, I'm just listening to the newest one and will be going to all the rest of them on YouTube in the coming days. I agree with a lot of what was said there so far. I'm personally completely uninterested in Hentai, but I absolutely don't mind milder/well-thought-out sexual content, many stories in VNs touch on various adult themes so there's no logical reason for sex to be excluded from that. Just most of the time the porn scenes in VNs are so trashy, schematic and obviously inserted solely as fapping material, so as someone who doesn't "use" that it's simply taking me out of the experience. I wished more devs take the approach similar to the authors of Dies Irae, with all ages version made with actual care and effort, but I have little hope for that actually happening - it's enough to point to what Dergonu wrote about the JP VN market in that hentai thread, sex do sell and people like me, wanting all-ages versions of everything that can work without porn, are most likely in minority even among the western VN fans. EDIT: And by having all ages versions I mean, ideally, having the ability to chose between the version with and without H-scenes, like many western VNs or better Steam releases do. Just not in a way that was mentioned in the podcast with Nekopara ("here's the obviously cut content"), but with at least minimal effort. It takes a few lines of well-written text to signal what was happening after the screen went black and don't leave you with an impression that something's obviously missing. It's just sad that publishers often can't give even that much thought and effort when censoring sexual content.

Also the minimal recurring donation is a really small one and you get the banner thingy right away.

Soooo... A kinetic novel with no mystery/intense drama, just slice-of-life stuff? That feels pretty unusual. But I agree with Ranzo, western college setting is at least something a bit different, I'll be folowing your project.

I'm generally against the idea of a "true ending" unless there's some kind of overarching mystery/intrigue that really needs it to be properly resolved (and the romance is secondary to that), or there's a sequel that needs it as a starting point. When there is a "true route" I usually don't get hyped for it and treat it like any other playthrough, it's my choice what I want to take from a game and which conclussion will be closest to my perception of the story. Especially in a standalone title, where I don't have to really care what's "canon".

Both of these are noble arts, worthy of perfecting. I wish you luck. And welcome to Fuwa, of course, I hope you'll have fun posting.

Considering that Plk is Polish equivalent of Col. (colonel), I guess using just "Lesiak" would make more sense. Sorry for using this confusing nick and for OT.

I wonder what you mean by being "just about that"? Taboo romance can be a great material for drama, it can devolve into pure fanservice of course, but I'm not sure what "more" would you want from a series like that other than an interesting clash of personalities and a couple trying to make sense of their socially-unacceptable feelings/struggling with social stigma? I also don't know exactly where it will go BTW, as I didn't want to spoil it to myself, but what I wrote above is more or less what I'm hoping for.

But isn't the original manga very much about the taboo yuri romance itself? I find it surprising that people are still uncomfortable with not-blood-related incest stories, especially in a VN community. ^^

Man, with that style of writing you use I never know whether you're trolling or writing all this stuf 100% seriously. But TBF, blogs don't get spammed around here. And while the trolls are annoying, they actually don't seem to harass individual people, apart from the poor LittleShogun who suddenly got showered with obnoxious shitposts. I would love to see a few people banned for this specific issue, but other than that they're just a minor annoyance (worthy maybe a few weekly bans - that would at least be the measure in my Uncyclopedia-admin days).

For me it would still be Analogue: A Hate Story, just because of the lasting impression it left me with. I was also thinking about Flowers, which I loved through and through and which cementing my love for yuri - but not being able to read more yuri after that would just be torture. That's how it looks now at least, I still haven't played through most of the kamige people would usually point to in this context, so I might change my mind in the future.

Thank you. What I write here, apart from serving my own fun and my own vanity, is definitely targeted towards the VN audience. I have very superficial knowledge about video game development and I'm also a pretty poor author, when it goes to creative writing, so the advice I could offer to developers is pretty limited. With the amount of time and energy I can spent here, I feel it's appropriate to tackle bad games only when I have something important to tell about them - here it was the pitfalls of common writing mistakes, next week it will be predatory mobile game mechanics. My real focus, for the foreseeable future, is exploring OELVNs and presenting valuable ones to people here, as many hardcore VN fans simply avoid them. As I've discovered the whole genre and got hooked on it through Western stuff, I want to make people aware that the VN world doesn't end in JP anymore.

Yeah, it was also in the middle of a casual SoL section, so the absurdity went through the roof. What's worse, that whole subplot played no real part in the story other than explaining why the protagonist in a shut-in and why government knows about his project. Obviously, there could be no better explanation for that than Illuminati and some illogical, world-ending conspiracies. If you write something, you can at least write big! But, after all, that's how you make EFFECTIVE PLOT TWISTS. No one can predict your next move if you defy all logic, including that of the setting you've created.

Hello there, Earthling! I have to say that for an inhabitant of this planet your punctuation still feels a bit alien, you should be a bit more mindful about that in future posts. ;p Anyways, I hope you'll have fun around here.

Well, I would usually avoid calling RPGs visual novels, as the gameplay/story ratio is usually heavily skewed in the direction of gameplay. That's why I've stopped playing RPGs, I've realized that I've played things like DA Inquisition or Star Wars: The Old Republic mostly for the story, while burning dozens of hours on mindless grind I didn't really care about. For me, VN is every medium where the text-based story content reigns supreme while any gameplay it offers is supplementary to that. In this way it's very hard for me to accept this kind of purist definitions that Palas creates, where VN is created only by stripping the game from any visible, number-based gameplay mechanics. What do I care that my story route in Long Live the Queen is some ways guided by the stats? The core content is still that of a visual novel, in a very literal understanding of the term. Same goes for most VN-hybrid games and dating sims - in most of them, the story content is the central part of the experience. Closer to the original topic, I think that gameplay can both make a VN better and break it. If gameplay elements are well-connected with the story and support its main themes, I can appreciate them even if they're mediocre by themselves - they simply work as that additional flavour that adds to the immersion. But I also hate then the gameplay lacks proper difficulty settings or skip option, so it could stall experiencing the story. For me, it's all about how it's implemented and how much time it takes - I really didn't switch from playing sandbox games to reading VNs just to play with mindless minigames for hours on end, but anything less extreme and somewhat approachable is ok with me, as long as it fits the story.

Hello Ladies & Gentlemen! So, yesterday I've published a review of a very disappointing VN - I'm always a bit wary about giving time and publicity to bad games, when you can give the spotlight to good ones that desperately need it, but I think there's some value in dissecting failed projects and talking about why they couldn't deliver, often despite the author's honest attempts. Obviously, bad games that are just lazy aren't that interesting, but bad games that tried hard and failed are often fascinating to me. Also, it seems that my review discouraged at least two people from buying the title in question, so it's already worth it. Either way, I hope you'll have fun reading it! In other news, as my activities on the blog focuses mostly around Steam, I thought it would be a logical extension to create a Curator Page connected to it. I don't expect anything out of it, but it's something I can expand while writing the blog in a somewhat seamless way, so I have few reasons not to do it. Obviously, if anyone wants to follow my recommendations there (or join the group linked to it), I will be very thankful. Have a great week everyone!