Clephas

Back to an excess of Isekai after two seasons of sequels and SOL?

Screaming Virtual Swordsman is not terrible, it is just full of itself.

I hadn't paid attention, but this series was apparently made by a subsidiary of the same company that owns Minato Soft... which explains the familiarity of the humor and the sound effects. Shukusei no Girlfriend 2 This entry in the series focuses on Maya, the heroine who serves as an antagonist initially in the first game. Maya is a very straightforward girl with a strong desire to take care of those younger than her. She is very much a warrior maiden with a strong motherly side (which she shows frequently). She is also a tennen character, meaning the humor in her path lies mostly in her continual failure to understand exactly what is going on until it smashes her in the face... particularly when it comes to the protagonist's normal sexual desires. Unlike Yuuri, is a misandrist, Maya is more of a tennen boke (one of those types who doesn't recognize romantic inclinations for what they are). Shukusei no Girlfriend 3 This path focuses on Kanoko, Yuuri's best friend and the slightly yandere-ish girl you are introduced to in the first game. Unlike the first two, which occur around the same time period (2 starts about a month or two after the point where 1 began), this one occurs a year later, after Maya and Petra have settled solidly into their new roles. Unlike the previous two games, which forced the heroine and protagonist (Seiji) together within the first ten to twenty minutes of the game, this one takes about twice as long to reach that point, showing Seiji gradually falling for Kanoko while Kanoko comes to realize he exists (Kanoko isn't exactly a people person). This is the longest of the three games... the first two each took up about four hours of my time, whereas this one took up about five and a half hours. This is perhaps because of Kanoko being the most complex of the three heroines by several degrees... There are a few serious points to this game, but even during the serious points there is a lot of ecchi, H, and comedy. Kanoko's dere is... dangerous. Well, all three heroines have a powerful dere (constructed by several months alone with the protagonist), but Kanoko's stands out for the fact that she is a closet pervert of a rather hard persuasion as well as a natural nympho. Well that, and I liked the long stretch there in the middle where Fujiko Disc Fujiko's path is of decent length, and it is basically an ichaicha-only path with none of the battle time you see intermittently in the other paths. Nor does it have an actual plot. Rather, it uses the same setup as Yuuri's path from the first game to create a live-together situation between Fujiko and the protagonist, with the result that they end up together. Overall for the series This is a pretty good series of games if you want to play something heavy on ecchi, ichaicha, and Minato soft style comedy. If you are looking for tentacle rape and aku-ochi, you will be (mostly) disappointed.

Like all Shumon Yuu games, this is a kamige. That said, this one is one of the more opaque games by him, so I don't recommend this for beginners at reading untranslated VNs. It was only on my second playthrough that I managed to really appreciate this game fully. This is one of those games where there is a ton of stuff going on in the background you are supposed to pick up on through roundabout hints. Edit: I don't recommend playing anything by Shumon Yuu until you can play a plotge without the machine translation (kanji parsers are ok). From what I've been told, the 'translations' outputted (this was three months ago from a guy I recommended Fumanaide to) don't even vaguely resemble sentences or the original text, even compared to normal machine translation.

It happens to me a lot. However, a lot of that is because my tastes in anime are odd/niche. I like what I call 'junk isekai' (low-level isekai based on crappy light novel series with op protagonists or that are heavy on SOL), old-style rom-coms (think Ai Yori Aoshi, Toradora, Nyan Koi, etc), fantasy, sci-fi, and action anime that aren't battle royale between normal people or mahou shoujo. With my favorite genres, I tend to be more forgiving unless they hit on one of my pet peeves... As an example, Arifureta Shokugyou. I still liked it, despite its horrible (and obvious) flaws, such as the odd CG monsters that looked like something from fifteen years ago (including the crappy combat animations) and the fact that the first six episodes were the prologue. Two anime that are beloved that I hated where Shingeki no Kyojin and FLCL... for two different reasons. I hated Shingeki no Kyojin because it reminded me of any number of 'monsters destroying humanity for no known reason' anime that came out in the nineties and first decade of the century. FLCL is a representative of the psychedelic (is mostly enjoyed by people that are high) genre, which has a tendency toward meaninglessness without the saving grace of decent comedy.

Shukusei no Girlfriend is the first of three games in the series, based in a world where mahou shoujo-like girls calling themselves Stars fight demons to protect humanity... a pretty standard setting that, in most games, would mean lots of tentacles, aku-ochi, and general mayhem that would range from the mildly distasteful to the outright disgusting. While in anime (non-hentai) most mahou shoujo are fairly straightforward and rigidly formulaic battle anime, in VNs, mahou shoujo usually end up on the wrong side of tentacles and/or monsters in the worst kind of way. Shukusei no Girlfriend, however, is neither... it is essentially a series of live-together rom-com vns. This one focuses on Yuuri, the genius wielder of light magic whose power is only matched by her arrogance, laziness, and narcissism. Normally, she puts on the face of being your standard 'pleasant to everyone' girl, but when in her Stars form, she shows her self-worshiping face as she exterminates massive numbers of Demons with her powerful light magic. Unfortunately, one night, she gets mortally wounded while failing to protect the protagonist (Seiji) and their lives get linked together... and they can't go more than a meter away from one another without dying. Yay! A perfect excuse for a live-together rom-com! Anyway, Yuuri is a bit of a misandrist, and at first there is a bit of mild domestic violence. However, the game soon shifts to a mix of ecchi, Yuuri being hilariously arrogant and occasionally showing her weak points. Generally speaking, the actual plot of this game is nonexistent to weak, but it is a generally amusing experience with nice ichaicha, an excellent cast of equally amusing female character, and a great ending (I love ten years later endings).

Kami no Rhapsody is severely lacking in part because Eushully designed it with an eventual possible port to mobiles and tablets in mind (you can tell by the unnecessary touchscreen compatibility and a few other aspects), and the way the progression is handled. In a single playthrough it is hard to progress characters sufficiently to make them effective at all in the last few battles, much less a trump card. On the second playthrough, it is possible to make the whole cast usable... but the fact that it pretty much takes the entire second playthrough says everything you need to know. The medal system is also a point of unnecessary complication in an already unnecessarily complicated setup. To be blunt, at the very least, they should have had special abilities, attacks, and skills unique to the character available without equipping the medals in question. Customization is all very well and good, but it shines the most when every character shares the same or similar abilities, not in a setting where every character has different abilities/skills/tendencies. Story-wise, Kami no Rhapsody is fairly decent as Eushully games go, being better than the company's kusoge entries (Sankai Ou no Yubiwa and Himegari) but not matching its better entries (Ikusa Megami series, Genrin, Madou Koukaku). It has the advantage of having only two heroines and their accompanying paths, but the lack of the more varied ending stories you see in the better Eushully games, plus the way the non-human heroines all get sidelined once you hit the actual path to the endings, makes the game weaker than it should have been, given that it is a one-off. The best contrast in terms of story that was also good by this company is Soukoku no Arterial, which had three main paths, plus variances on the final ending depending on which heroine you pursued (the demon ending, which only has one outcome, being set aside) or Ikusa Megami Verita, which was split into the True History, Darkness, and Light paths which had immensely varying outcomes. Like Kamidori and Amayui, it is a game that had a lot of potential but was tripped up by various parts that made me wince. When I tried to replay it last year, it felt similarly to when I played it when it was first released... a game that is ruined in part by its protagonist, in part by the battle system, and in part by the fact that half the game seems to be centered around finding excuses for h-scenes with every female available. Amayui is probably the most tolerable of the three by several degrees, at least in my opinion.

Added spoiler boxes. Casual readers might decide to see what the thread is about despite the spoiler warning.

Textractor is fairly reliable, but some old games it has trouble with. I found a code for motto, the sequel, but nothing for this one. Since that is the case, it is likely a game that could be hooked by agth, before windows 10 disabled its use (some of the extra threads would sometimes hook for games that didn't in later text-hookers). That means your best option is probably Textractor, since VNR isn't supported anymore.

Most people, even Nitroplus fans, consider Gekkou no Carnevale an acquired taste. I liked it, I liked the themes, and I even liked the fighting. I didn't like two of the four heroines (ironically, I disliked both of the main heroines, while I liked their respective sub-heroines and their endings). Like most Nitroplus games, it has sound problems (for some reason, almost all Nitroplus games have 'gaps' between the loops of their BGMs, and it can be jarring when the music cuts out for a second during an important scenes). The story in general is too much of a 'chapter in an endless saga' type thing with the beginnings mostly ignored. The main antagonist on the wolf side is boring, and the one on the doll side is unnecessarily inscrutable. As such, the game will always remain an acquired taste adored by its fans and disliked by most everyone else. Edit: to be clear about what I mean by the 'endless saga' comment, the fights between the werewolves and the doll-users.

This? Most translation groups fall apart inside the first two months, because members realize they don't have the skills and quietly give up or spend all their time chatting randomly on the Discord because they don't want to admit they don't have the willpower to learn as they go. It's worse if there are members who can't contribute. Again this. One doesn't start a fantranslation group just because they want to... they start it because there is something they want to translate, specifically. This is why most fantranslation groups are started by a translator.

I could say a lot of things, but most of them would be negative, so I'll say good luck (not sarcastically).

The Recluce Saga, despite being a somewhat niche 'high fantasy' novel series, is perhaps one of the largest and most monolithic such series to have been written in the last forty years. Beginning back in the eighties and spanning more than twenty books now, it is LE Modesitt Jr.'s signature series, the series that propelled him from a somewhat eccentric author of varying science fantasy and science fiction novels and series to one of the quiet dominators of high fantasy as a genre. The Recluce Saga setting is defined by wars, conflicts, and clashes between normal society and the mages of the two forces known as chaos and order. Chaos is energy, change, destruction, and entropy, whereas order is structure, reinforcement, defense, and healing/restoration. It is very easy, if you read the early books, to regard users of chaos as 'evil', and it is true that a disproportionate number of them are evil. Order users find it extremely difficult (painful and sometimes deadly) to be dishonest in any fashion, to kill, and even to touch edged weapons at times. Chaos users fling firebolts, break down the structure of objects, and corrupt/corrode the people and world around them. Chaos users and those who are touched by chaos are natural liars and deceivers, often selfish and ambitious, and they generally can't be trusted at all. However, later books, regarding the foundation of Hamor and the Cyador era (both in the past) show that there are chaos users who escape the fate of those who not only use chaos but let it into their souls. Lorn'alte is a man who has the passion and ambition of a chaos user, combined with the idealism and sense of what is right that one who can also touch order possesses. In a nation built on the use of chaos, he sees what is best about his nation and strives to make it stronger, even as the forces of those whose ambitions are entirely selfish and those driven by irrational fears try to destroy him again and again. Lerial, the second son of the Duke of Cigoerne, has a journey from a somewhat petulant child of a chaos wizard to a mature adult who understands the costs and necessities of protecting the fledgling nation his grandmother formed. Perhaps the greatest gift these two series granted me, as a long-time reader of the series, was transforming white mages from faceless schemers and destroyers to people with cares and woes not so different from the average person, just enhanced by their power. The earlier books primarily focus on events around Recluce and the order users. Recluce is a nation formed by one of the most powerful weather mages (weather magic being born of order) in history and a gray mage who was bound to him. Recluce is a nation born as a refuge of order users, who are often disliked by those in power because their benefits are subtle and their ability to see truth (and the knowledge they don't lie) is well-known to the average person. However, by the time of the first book (Magic of Recluce) Recluce is one of the greatest powers in the world (a defensive-isolationist power but still a power), with steam ships made out of black iron and mage-engineers forging weapons that no chaos mage can stand against. Most of the protagonists of the various arcs of the early series are young men who are idealistic order mages, who don't learn until after many painful trials and tribulations that the world is what it is and what is right is not necessarily what is. This is an issue for many young order mages, apparently, because of their tendency to view what is right as what should be (order mages have a tendency toward rational morality that is somewhat rigid). Moreover, as a result of their journeys through life, they experience suffering on enormous scales, as they must deal with the world's backlash to their attempts to make it better. Many end up unleashing terrible destruction and change upon the world, ironically creating the very chaos they themselves sought to reduce. And that comes to the nature of the Balance. In the world of the Recluce saga, the two forces are always, no matter what, evenly matched. For every iota of order energy in the world, whether bound in objects or free in the world, there will always be an equal amount of chaos present. As Recluce builds itself up, chaos mages become more plentiful and powerful, and it becomes possible for Recluce and artificers in general to make better and more effective weapons from iron and steel, thus also incrementally increasing the amount of free chaos in the world. Most of the protagonists in the Recluce saga are good people at heart, often forced into situations where they have no choice but to kill, destroy, and bring about change in order to make things better for the future. They are people who can see beyond the immediate, who often see generations and centuries into the future, and they possess the inner steel necessary to change things... even as their actual desires are often more humble in origin, to have a family, to be able to work a forge without fear of caprice from the powerful, to see that their female children not be used as chattels, etc. This is a theme throughout most of Modesitt's fantasy, as the basic motivations of his characters are humble while resulting in great change, because of the expanded viewpoint they gain as a result of their journeys through life.

Ayakashibito's Kaoru An unnamed (spoiler) Tsukihime heroine.

Akeiro is much better, but Kimagure has the advantage of being a kinetic novel with more direct mystery elements and high sexual content. If you were just looking to only have to translate a single path's worth of text, it is a decent investment.

Moshimo Ashita ga Harenaraba The game doesn't get that much attention from modern VN readers, but it is definitely worthy of mention. As one of the best nakige of the 'second era' of the genre (the first having begun with One and extending to the release of Clannad and the second one having lasted until 2011, when the genre went into hiatus for a while) it is something I think anyone who isn't an art bigot and likes SOL and good feels should at least try.

AXL doesn't really vary its general formula where it involves heroines that much. They reuse templates shamelessly, but the games they produce are almost universally enjoyable from beginning to end, which is in itself an accomplishment. Rather than forcibly evolving their style to perfectly match trends, they've just polished their existing style, making incremental improvements and finding ways to use their existing toolkit more effectively. AXL is the paragon of doing the same thing in new ways, and so if you have played any AXL game, other AXL games will feel familiar but different, which is surprisingly reassuring, since 'innovation' can become toxic when it goes too far.

If I can add another one... https://vndb.org/v1483 Kamige, obscure to western audiences, and it is written by Shumon Yuu, the legendary VN writer.

Sakura no Mori Dreamers is a pretty decent game, even despite the crazy Freddy Krueger thing they have going. The protagonist's despair and lust for revenge are written in a way that really draws you into his hunt for the killer, and his relationship with Madoka will break your heart again and again. It is one of the few horror VNs I find palatable, along with Butterfly Seeker and End Sleep.

Yeah... I mean, I don't have Nezha, David, or Lu bu leveled, but I do have them, lol. That's one good thing about events where a Servant can increase item drops.

Only ones I've played (that I remember) are Netotte Megami and Edelweiss. Netotte Megami was pretty awful, as I recall (nukige with bad h-scenes and almost had a real story, lol). Edelweiss... I actually played in English, if you could actually call that English. Edelweiss's first version (1.0) on Mangagamer was a straight-out machine translation with no edit whatsoever. I actually enjoyed it more when I replayed it in Japanese later, though even then there were so many much better games out there...

One thing you need to keep in mind is that, while most companies have a specialty or a peculiar style, that style often morphs over time and a good portion of those companies will occasionally do something completely out of character. Moonstone is primarily a sappy charage company, but they produced Sakura no Mori Dreamers. Overdrive produced Bokuten. Light created Campus, which is essentially a charage company. Even Navel has been swaying back and forth between genres in recent years.

Reddit is just another Facebook. I tried it once and once was enough for me to delete my account. Discord... doesn't encourage community at all. It just encourages non-informative random conversation (just like all chat apps).

Otaku forums are mostly dying across the world... and those that aren't dead are at an all-time low point. I prefer forums, because they are more homey, less impersonal and momentary-feeling than a reddit or a chat application (twitter and Facebook being too evil for words). It is hard to create a true microcosm of a community inside of any other type of online social media. I used to be a member of about fourteen Japanese otaku forums, but they are all dead, the last one having died about six months ago after almost a year of activity lower than here.

Clock up has scat, lol. Also, no Light, so I call BS on the no school life line.