Clephas

Sumaga isn't something to look forward to, anyway.

Seinarukana, Aselia's sequel, will be released sometime in the near future (supposedly).

Incest is probably the most common element in moege... about two-thirds have an imouto route, and about half of those have it with a blood-related imouto. That isn't to mention the older sister routes...

In Japan, portable systems are still the chosen non-PC platform (PSV, PSP, and 3DS) for moege. It is relatively rare for a VN to make the transition to smartphone or to be developed for smartphone. I've heard of pirated voice-cut versions going on smartphone, but other than that... As for the one-off dating sims, unfortunately most don't get on vndb, so I don't have a handy link available. I'd suggest looking up 同人　ゲーム and 'dating sim' on google for the indies. Generally speaking, to justify a port to console or smart phone in the first place, a number of factors have to coincide to create the belief such a port can succeed in the company's eyes. One of these factors is popularity/sales (obviously), as many people prefer to play their games on the run over there. Another is the technological capability... most VN companies, frankly, don't have this capability. Only the large ones can generally afford to hire someone to port their games to a non-PC platform, generally. The average VN company either uses an established engine such as Kirikiri or develops a single engine that they reuse for all their games, usually specialized for a single platform (PC, PSP, 3DS, etc). In other words... the question comes down to money and the belief that they can make a profit. Since most VN gamers are either PC-gamers or have a portable console in Japan, most VNs, dating sims, and the like go there. Japanese gaming companies tend to be conservative, and as a result, many hesitate to make transitions to new platforms, which is one of the reasons for the relatively weak smartphone application market for games over there.

Try Asmodean's reverse-engineering download page. He has ones for hundreds of VNs on that page.

Dating sims, in the classic sense, are almost unknown today... pretty much because they got supplanted by actual virtual dating (for people that wanted realism, lol) and moege (for people who just wanted a pretty fantasy without the actual effort). The ones that remain are mostly indie or made as a one-off by a company testing the waters. Edit: This is mostly an assessment of the Japanese situation. It isn't that they don't exist, it is that they only exist in very small numbers or in very low-quality now because of a lack of demand over there. I'm not interested in English-language moe-culture, so I don't know about the English-speaking end of things. Edit2: Also, most of what Keita is playing would be considered moege or eroge. Dating sims is just the translation non-otakus gave it, lol.

One of the reasons Nitroplus was willing to take the risk is because their sales have been falling rapidly outside of the Science series (starting with Chaos;Head) in Japan since Muramasa was released, but they still had a lot more liquid assets than the average VN company, because of the explosive sales of Jingai Makyou, Muramasa, and a few of their other early games upon their initial release. The Sumaga team consistently makes games that don't appeal to their original fanbase, and as a result, they lost a lot of their core fans. Sumaga and the other games by that team do appeal to people who like extremely weird stories with whacked out elements that are absurd (if not amusing). However, that is a group even more niche than the horror/dark/fantasy/violence/utsuge fans that liked the stuff done by the original team. Currently, the Japanese division of the company is only afloat due to the sales of Steins;Gate in particular and the rest of the Science series in general. And yes, I do know that the Science series is a joint project with 5pb.

Clockup mostly makes rapegames, guro/tentacle, and nukige.

One of Gensou no Idea's protagonists is an amnesiac (an extreme one). Three characters in Reminiscience have some sort of memory block/problem. Harumade Kururu, for reasons I don't want to spoil. Natsu no Owari no Nirvana, once again for reasons I don't want to spoil. Phantom of Inferno, though it is only a starting point, not the central-most factor. Sinclient, the protagonist, briefly. Tokyo Babel, Sorami (though there are reasons for it that I won't spoil, lol). Abyss Homicide Club (the protagonist). Gleam Garden no Shoujo (again, won't spoil it for you). Hotel. (it is spelled with the period) Devils Devel Concept's protagonist has intentional/provisional amnesia (he deliberately forgets things he doesn't consider important, for reasons I won't spoil). Para-sol. Bloody Rondo. Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen Hachimyoujin. I could go on, but these are the cream of the crop...

I remember playing Persona 3 when it first came out... and recognizing it was using elements similar to a dating-sim. At the time, I wasn't familiar with normal VNs, but I recognized some of the elements immediately when I played my first few moege. I had a few laughs at the expense of the writers of the game, but overall it was a great game.

http://vndb.org/v14264 http://vndb.org/v14062 http://vndb.org/v13904 http://vndb.org/v13630 http://vndb.org/v13628 This is the lineup for next month. The ones I definitely am going to play are the one by NostalgicChord, Sakigake, the one by Ensemble, and the Majo one. I may or may not play the last, as that company has yet to satisfy me with any of its games.

lol... Read the review they have on RPGfan... it sums the game up pretty well...

I was mostly using it as an example of potential, but then someone had to troll me on Eushully games. Really, any genre that lets you sit and think could use a VN portion to tell the story... but srpg and rpg genre already have lots of fusions, with mixed results (some are absolutely terrible). Edit: Also, one of my points was that the Japanese tend to have a lot of weaknesses when it comes to game systems. While they can make brilliantly choreographed games very well... when you get off the rails, they tend to lose out to western developers.

Just finished Genrin no Kishougun 2, the second game of that series. My thoughts on this game are far more positive than they were for the first game. While the visuals are only slightly improved in comparison to the previous game, the battle system is more refined (at the cost of battles lasting longer near the end, because characters have more HP) and the story is both much larger and better written. To be honest, playing this game made me wonder 'How could they have made so much better a game in so short a time?'. I'd really suggest you just play Eien no Ikusa Hime to see the story for the first game, then just jump into this one. Similar to the first game, you are given a very limited time between battles for interaction between the characters, recruitment, purchases, and grinding. As a result, it is very easy to end up completely screwed over in terms of fighting power if you fail to use those turns effectively to power up your units. The shortage of crests for class changes also harms you greatly as the game goes by, though in the late game you can go to the secret shop for more of them. This game falls into the trap of 'too many endings for a long game' in that there is an ending for every single female recruitable character, as well as a chaos and a law ending. The law ending corresponds to a 'good' ending, and it is suitably touching and overall emotionally empowering. You can guess what the chaos ending is like, lol. One huge plus, if you don't want to fight and just want the story (I played it because I needed to be able to evaluate it) is that you can make the battles skippable using the 2.0 patch (I think so, but am not quite sure that this is what does it). This lets you just watch the story, the recruitment events, etc. without having to bother with the battles, which become really tedious after a while, especially when the story gets good toward the end. Edit: Now, on to Ikusa Megami Verita! lol

Still ten times better than Kamidori or Himegari, the true mediocre games in Eushully's lineup...

http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2014/1471.html Finally... the game that made me not just like Shin Megami Tensei, but love it.

I just finished my second playthrough of Genrin no Kishougun and Ikusa Megami Zero as part of my 'lead up to the remake of the original Ikusa Megami' marathon. A few thoughts on IMZ: There are a lot of reasons I love this game... but perhaps the biggest reason I favor it is because of the sheer depth of the story. A protagonist's experiences over the course of almost two hundred years, with experiences ranging from simple love, the depths of madness, and amnesia. This game has a great cast of characters... primarily centered around the protagonist, Satia, and Haishiera. Satia and the protagonist make a great couple, for how long it lasts, and Haishiera is one of my favorite Eushully characters... a berserk demon-god who loves a good fight. The story itself is VN-rpg fare on a grand scale, showing the protagonist's growth into his role and the horrors that follow him around throughout the first stages of his long existence. The battle system is a straightforward grid turn-based system, with a few twists (like your sword being able to hit multiple times based on your hit% and hit number, and the area-of-effect for spells and weapons). You upgrade your skills - both weapon and tech/magic - through (rather obviously) using the related spells or weapons. Everybody but the protagonist (whom you can grow as you wish) auto-levels when they level up. The protagonist also has a number of times throughout the game when he automatically powers up, regardless of level, gaining huge boosts to stats. One huge problem is that most of your allies are summoned by the protagonist, and if he is defeated they are automatically sent home, which can be a serious downer in some of the late-game boss battles. Genrin no Kishougun: To be honest, this game is horribly dated, as is its sequel. The tracks are iffy at best, the visuals are dated, and the writing is second-class compared to more recent Eushully games. If you want to skip to Verita, there is a free mini-VN that contains the story for this game and its sequel that you can download from the Eushully website. This has a Fire Emblem-like battle system (along with the all-hated permadeath) with a few major exceptions... the protagonist summons his allies around him and they can go back into his dimensional pocket whenever you want them to on their turn, if you can move them next to him. He can also put whatever items he wants from the party inventory into his own, which is a huge advantage if he is isolated and you need to keep spamming healing items. Overall though... the speed with which the game forces you to progress makes the difficulty level of this game punishing, with not nearly enough time or places to grind levels. The last few battles are seriously painful, even if you do have a solid party.

Tsuki ni Yorisou, Otome no Sahou and its sequel. Otome ga Tsumugu Koi no Canvas.

I was more going for an RTS developer teaming up with a VN developer... or an RTS developer using the VN techniques for storytelling, with decent writers. Telling stories through movies is hideously expensive and time-consuming, whereas VN-storytelling is relatively cheap and far more effective from a reader's perspective.

Madou Koukaku wasn't mediocre... but the battle system could have been better. I've seen mediocre games... and that isn't one of them.

A few points, for western-produced VNs. There are a number of barriers to western-produced VNs reaching the level of quality you see over in Japan in terms of visuals, if not in writing (Katawa shoujo being an exception to the rule). 1. Artist aesthetics- I'm sure at least some of you have noticed that most of the artists producing VNs in the US and the west in general (with a few glaring exceptions) simply don't have the right style to grasp the imagination of established otakus, thus weakening the chances of western-produced VNs being able to compete with Japanese for our lovely niche market. 2. Impact- Most western-produced VNs just don't have the impact that the best Japanese ones possess. Honestly, this is more a cultural issue than a quality issue. Subtlety is difficult in American English and our writers tend to take a realistic approach to story-writing. Emotional surrealism, which is the basic bread and butter of Japanese-style VNs, is extremely hard for native English-speakers to produce. To be blunt, we simply don't have the right type of linguistic expressions and depth to create something like Clannad from scratch. Attempts to do so tend to fall flat and seem less refined, as a result. Some great pluses we have in our favor. 1. A realistic-oriented culture. When it comes to action/war stories, we frankly have a huge advantage over the Japanese in providing a sense of realism. This is because we haven't spent over half a century doing our best to erase militarism from our culture and because violence in media is something we are exposed to from a very young age. However, if taken too far, without emotionality to color the stories, this can result in a bland, factual type of storytelling that will - quite frankly - turn off the average otaku, even ones who like violence. Games like Skyrim and Fallout 3 demonstrate the extreme edges of this type of storytelling, where the player's emotions aren't really engaged, despite huge amounts of text. Purpose-oriented text without a lot of context surrounding it tends to create dry stories, lol. This is why I don't bewail the type of extended character development you see in Japanese VNs as much as some people... I understand the necessity. 2. Even if VNs themselves are not yet becoming that popular over here, VN-storytelling has the potential to revolutionize the story-focused rpg video game and strategy game. Imagine a modern-style RTS utilizing a VN-style story-mode, where you get to know your heroes, thus giving you an emotional background to enjoy the story as well as the gameplay. Combined with the fast-paced strategy of such a game, you could find yourself honestly absorbing yourself emotionally in the struggle for power, rather than sitting back in your seat and dispassionately delivering commands to your peons and armies. With role-playing games, we've already seen how the addition of VN-storytelling can add to the plot of a good story, eliminating some of the reliance on visual aspects (and the accompanying programming and extra costs) to tell the story.

Most new studios go under if they don't get a reasonably big hit right away, due to production costs. Companies like Will, AB2 and Visual Arts can afford to take mediocre sales of one or two games, but smaller companies can't. Most companies start with nukige, because nukige sell fairly well and are cheap to produce. However, if a company produces too many nukige in a row, serious fans won't take them seriously, and so even if they make a serious game, it doesn't sell. Incidentally, one of the reasons 'serious' vns tend to also be ero is because they make more money that way. It is much harder to make money on a game with no erotic content in Japan in the VN industry. Otome games are the exception, because female fans are just fine either way in most cases. It's something of a vicious cycle for the male-oriented games, though. Because most VN fans start out as nukige or borderline-nukige fans, they can't really do without sexual content in most cases. Fans expect it in most cases (action and serious story-focused can sometimes get away with it, but moege can't, lol).

People know about VNs, but it is seen as for extreme otakus. It isn't all that different from the way it is here, except that there are larger numbers of fans and they don't have to import. They aren't as niche as we are here, but they make up a relatively small percentage of the otaku population.

Don't worry, once you learn Japanese there are at least sixty games that could match those two that I can think of just off the top of my head. MLA picks its readers because it is an utsuge, and Katawa is just the best native-English VN made so far, lol

Most non-nukige VNs have the protagonist set as a soft S or M with a hard M heroine or two. S heroines are rarer (probably because you are supposed to be seeing yourself as the protagonist) but they definitely exist. Almost all tsundere heroines are at least a soft M, incidentally. lol As for hard S&M play outside of a nukige... Akatsuki no Goei's third game comes to mind (I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out which heroine is a hard M in advance). The protagonist of Tsuki ni Yorisou, Otome no Sahou and its sequel is a perfect example of a protagonist capable of both soft S and hard M (lol, I doubt you'll be surprised at which heroine is a hard S in that one).