Clephas

Welcome. If you've run out, feel free to learn Japanese so I can bombard you with suggestions, lol. I'll be happy to drown you in an endless sea of VNs that will corrupt your soul and make you over into someone who will never look at a 3D woman/man/it again.

lol, I would feel the same way... except I know the price of putting homework off all too well, from my early college days (and dropout) a decade past. Do your homework, get it over with, and enjoy your gaming with a free heart and soul... it is a lot more pleasant that way all around. My new school life can be defined by these simple words: 'Get it over with as fast as possible.'

Ok, I'll take it as a given that yall are playing VNs in at least some of your free time... but just what causes you to make the decision to play a visual novel? I play them when: I'm not interested in actual gameplay/want a story, while I eat, to take a break from work.

I don't mind moe... though I don't like it when it is the whole point of what you are watching/reading/playing. Anime like Kiddy Grade manage to balance great story with fanservice and extreme moe, but ones like K-on exist solely for the sake of moe. Games like Uruwashi no possess moe factors, but their story is the main point. However, ones like Akane Iro ni Somaru Saka exist solely to moe you to death.

It is a tsundere-fest, yes. Well, except the maid. She's not tsundere... rather she enjoys screwing with the protagonist's head.

Makura's games tend to have slightly weird characters and character-relationships. This game isn't an exception. I liked the maid's route and the vice-president's route the best, personally. The protag is your standard donkan protag, though he is perhaps more capable than your average protag. His intelligence is average, but he works hard to make up for his flaws and to satisfy those who place their trust in him. The paths tend to vary in degrees of drama - in particular, the vice-president;s path has some interesting twists - but as moege go, this is a good choice.

I think FFT took more risks... FFXII was born of an abortive attempt at imitating it because they were based in the same world. The ideas and non-physical setting of the game were interesting, but the way they told the story and its progression varied from boring to absolutely senseless.

Corporate influence - in particular, the idea of 'mainstream appeal' - is the greatest threat to good stories. I state this as a fact rather than a simple opinion. Efforts to appeal to wider and wider audiences have a bad habit of creating stories that have a disturbing degree of similarity (most moege are exactly like all other moege, as are the various sub-genres of nukige). If you want an example of this influence in the regular video game industry, Final Fantasy is a rather obvious one. Originally, FF was a major series in a niche genre that pandered to its fanbase unashamedly... but when jrpgs showed a possibility of becoming part of the mainstream, they immediately acted to 'widen its appeal', resulting in Final Fantasy X, which, while and admittedly awesome game, also was the game that killed the traditional 'overworld map' and introduced 'on the rails' environments. To be blunt, the element of world exploration was lost from most jrpgs after that, because it was found to be much easier to blur things on geography and pass the players through a tunnel that looked like a wide-open field. By the time Final Fantasy XII came out, all traces of creativity had been eliminated from the story-writing, leaving a rather bland narrative and a rather pathetic reliance on 'cutting edge visuals' and voice-acting to cover it up. For anime... so many examples, but if I had to pick one that stands out as a 'standard' for predictable and bland story-writing... sorry, too many to name. The existence of moeblob comes to mind, as do your standard 'love-comedy' anime... but you can see the effects of over-farming of the same ideas in the simple fact that we are lucky to see three decent anime series come out in a single year now. That said, it is kind of funny that they spend so much time chasing that illusionary mainstream appeal, since all it is doing is making people want unique or niche products.

lol... they are talking about Western games, and they are full of BS. If anything, game stories have gotten progressively crappier in the last four to five years. If you are talking about decent plots in Western games, the Mass Effect trilogy is an example of godliness... and there are plenty of jrpgs pre-2006 that had great stories (even if they later became tropes and cliches). Anyone who says this is the age of 'video games with story' hasn't been paying attention for the past seventeen years or so... Edit: The fact that most of the ideas from the Last of Us were stolen from a certain post-apocalyptic book series that I won't name here is so bloody obvious that I have to laugh when people say the story is unique.

Visual novels mean different things to different people. For some they are a source of plots that anime writers can't afford to try (due to corporate restrictions), for others they are a way to satisfy gratuitous moe lust, and for yet others they are simply yet another excuse to fap. What are visual novels to you? In my case, VNs were an epiphany, originally. In my mind, no medium so effectively appeals to the mind through the written word, visual input, and aural input as well. The medium has a potential for storytelling that far surpasses any existing medium, for those who prefer to use their imagination but also want an experience (as opposed to books, where the reader's imagination is the greater part of the experience). Later, I grew to appreciate how this niche medium was free - to an extent - from the corruption of excessive corporate intervention. This was because production costs for a medium-quality (visual and audio) are far lower than the costs of a normal video game's development. This also makes indie production cheaper and easier. Of course, the sheer number of moege and nukige out there show the ubiquitous presence of the corporate world's overpowering influence even here, but I've experienced stories from VNs that would never have survived the scrutiny an anime or a traditional video game story undergoe from their corporate slave masters. This, in itself, proves the value of the medium, despite the glut of low-quality moege and nukige out there.

*injects the loli with the 'homicidal nekololi ninja virus', which turns all lolis infected with it into homicidal nekololi ninjas who perform meaninglessly cool murders at random* Welcome...

I won't make any suggestions until you've trespassed in my territory (untranslated vns), but I do welcome you to Fuwa.

It isn't an issue. Rather, the accompaniment of voices makes it easier for those used to translating by ear, though most are using an extracted script in any case.

Somebody with an account nominate Hinaori Kagome from Comyu... I'm not interested in registering for another forum at the moment, lol.

From the top left, it's Yumiko, Amane, Michiru, Makina, and Sachi. Upper right is H-scenarios for non-heroines (I think there is also a twosome in there, but I may be mixing it up) and below that are short skits/scenes with the main story in the lower right corner. WARNING: Do NOT play the main story unless you intend to immediately jump into Rakuen, as it feeds right into it on a cliffhanger that had me throwing things at the walls.

There are a ton of recommendations that might fit your tastes in the Visual Novel Discussion board, so feel free to look through it, unless you want me to recommend you something untranslated. Anyway, welcome to Fuwa.

http://vndb.org/v8213 http://vndb.org/v5349 http://vndb.org/v646 http://vndb.org/v5909 http://vndb.org/v3767 (this entire series) http://vndb.org/v11955 http://vndb.org/v9847 http://vndb.org/v4942 http://vndb.org/v7685 http://vndb.org/v10237 http://vndb.org/v7650 http://vndb.org/v2369 This is a list of series with gakuen and moe to semi-moe elements with a fantasy sort of setting. I deliberately cut out the really dark stuff, because that is obviously not what you are looking for. Ayakashibito, Shinigami no Testament, Bloody Rondo, and Trouble@Vampire the darkest of the group and might be too much, though they aren't nearly as bad as the stuff I usually recommend. Kamikaze Explorer, Naka no Hito Nado Inai, and Dracu-riot lean farther towards the moe end of the spectrum. The Tiny Dungeon series is a fantasy series about a school based in a pocket dimension where demons, divine beings, draconic humanoids, and humans train together in the art of fighting and exploration. It is hilarious, interesting, and has a good set of characters.

*feeds Shinobu-chan a few hobos, whom she promptly sucks dry, tossing their withered corpses to the side* Welcome.

... it is like Prism Ark? Sorry, not much like that that isn't pure crap out there. That kind of attempt at fusing moe and absurdly badly-designed settings and action/serious story together tends to fail when it comes to VNs.

My top is the Kara no Kyoukai movies (I really see them as a single, incredibly long movie)... then the UBW movie. The rest? I don't really like most anime movies, honestly. lol

tbh, most of the chuuni series in the last few years have been pathetic, save for the final season of Shana. They lack that sheer sense of melodrama and self-importance that a good chuuni anime/game/manga/etc. needs. Most of them spend too much time on the slice of life and comedy parts, thus making the series' overall less interesting. To Aru Kagaku no Railgun's latest season also was decent, but it also left me hating it because I wasn't interested in something based before the original Index series. I thought I was going to be able to see some parallel progression, but I had to give up on that...

Don't worry, even if you are a monster, I like you enough not to care. Some of my favorite VN characters are monsters, evil priests, or near-sociopaths, lol.

Mahou Sensou and Noragami have me itching for chuuni deliciousness...

http://vndb.org/v963 This one has a nice cow-girl heroine, but it isn't what you are looking for. I'm just taking the opportunity to advertise, lol.

I'm not sure whether Kaguya is male or female... but I honestly don't care. 'Him' is more convenient than 'it' or 'him/her'.