Clephas

Play the Japanese version of Grisaia and you'll see the similarities pretty quickly. The translated version loses a lot of the 'flavor' of his writing. I'd also suggest Hatsuru Koto Naki Mirai Yori, just for kicks. As for similar protagonists... HHG ( Hyper→Highspeed→Genius ) Tenshi no Hane o Fumanaide Ojou-sama no Hanbun wa Ren'ai de Dekiteimasu Ojou-sama wa Gokigen Naname Kikan Bakumatsu Ibun (borderline... protagonist gains various different perspectives based on which of the main story paths you head down, and he is intelligent. However, he is uneducated.) Re;Birth Colony Reminiscence To be honest, most of the time, when the protagonist is intelligent, he is also OP, so it was hard to think of more examples...

Otoboku

Venus Blood tentacle impregnation games (Gaia, Abyss, Lagoon, and Brave)

That's just mean, man. Honestly, I stopped joining communities after my last four died on me in less than a year each... I only skim random forums for news and talk to old friends using email these days.

I'll just list the translated ones for now, unless you can play untranslated. Translated: Ayakashibito Comyu Hello, Lady (soon) Sorcery Jokers

Honestly, i think it would be great if they made more games in the same setting... but instead we got that crappy 'spiritual sequel' in Libra, which is obviously derived from the same ideas but has a much crappier protagonist and set of heroines (no Belche to give them life). *Clephas extracts the mind-control tentacles from Nandemonai's brain*

I honestly think that anyone who likes vampires should play Draculius... it has the same writer as Grisaia, and the style is pretty similar.

Hatsugamai (or Soshite Hatsukoi ga Imouto ni Naru) is one of my favorite nakige from the last four years. Feeling in the need of some emotional catharsis, I finally went back to it a while back, and I was blown away a second time by just how powerful the emotions this game brings out are. First, it should be noted that Alcot Honeycomb, the subsidiary of Alcot that produced this game is known for two things... that it is a low to mid-price and budget company and for the fact that they have never produced a flop. Every one of their games has come out in the black within six months of release, and they inevitably end up placing at least in the top twenty of any given year. Another quality of their games is that there are no 'wasted scenes' in their games. Every scene drives story and path progression, without exception. This game is no exception. I am going to focus on introducing the characters of this game, since you can check out my previous blog post on the game if you want an idea of what the game as a whole is like. Tokitani Kazuharu- The protagonist of the story, he is a hard-working young man who is absolutely devoted to his own financial independence and protecting his 'family' (currently consisting of Shinobu and Manami). At the age of eight, he ran away from home to get away from verbal and physical abuse from his mother and eventually adopted another runaway, his 'imouto' Shinobu. If it weren't for Old Man Tatara, their current guardian, he probably would have ended up living on the street for the rest of what was likely to be a very short life. As it is, he works hard every day at multiple part time jobs to feed, clothe, and shelter himself and Shinobu (ignoring Tatara's offers to pay for everything) and lives at a rickety school dorm with Tatara's granddaughter Manami. Kazuharu is a young man of intense feeling and kindness. While he considers himself to be a practical, at times unfeeling person, it is fairly obvious to those around him that he is the very reverse of that. Kazuharu is constitutionally incapable of setting aside responsibilities or abandoning someone who calls out to him for help. His immense capacity for love and selfless behavior make him a powerful character, and his emotional scars often bring tears to my eyes. Tokitani Shinobu- As a small child, she ran away from an abusive situation to live under a bridge, where she was found and informally adopted by Kazuharu. She quickly and intensely fell in love with Kazuharu after his ferocious efforts to protect her and keep her fed in the time before Tatara discovered and took them in, and that love has, if anything, only grown deeper and more intense with time (she is almost yandere at times). Unlike Kazuharu, who struggles with school while working, she is the student council president and the highest scorer on school tests, while still working multiple part-time jobs. Like Kazuharu, she has a very clear-headed and down-to-earth view of the future... if you ignore the fact that her view of the future involves her creating a corporation solely so she can take the burden of financial support off her brother's shoulders. Despite how this sounds, she isn't completely monomaniacal. Having been practically raised by Kazuharu and seeing him as an example, she is a deeply kind and compassionate young woman, with a deep capacity for love that matches his own. Tatara Manami- One of the three major side characters in the game, along with her grandfather, she is a child (about ten) who speaks in Kansai-ben and has a tendency to abuse pseudo-anglicanisms. Her cheery personality and cute attempts to sort-of mother the people at the dorm hide a deep loneliness born from the fact that her parents abandoned her, leaving her busy grandfather to raise her pretty much as an absentee parent. She has a strong bond with the Tokitani siblings, one that is at times adversarial (jokingly) with Kazuharu and conspiratorial with Shinobu. Tatara Taizen- Shinobu and Kazuharu's guardian and Manami's grandfather... as well as the owner and head of the board of directors for Shinobu and Kazuharu's high school. He is a man who has spent his entire life in education and sent innumerable students out to succeed in the world. However, his own family is a horrible mess, with his daughter and son-in-law having abandoned his granddaughter Manami and his own responsibilities making it impossible for him to raise her in his own home. He adopted Shinobu and Kazuharu when he discovered them as runaways (he has apparently done this in the past) and supported them out of compassion. He is a true educator at heart, devoting himself to the well-being and future of his students. He and Kazuharu frequently fight (in a friendly manner) and his mannerisms are frequently humorous or deliberately display him as a dirty old man. However, his love for Manami and the two siblings is deep. Minamino Shouhei- Kazuharu's best friend and the son of a yakuza family. Despite his origins, his goal in life is to work in childcare, and his personality is kind and cheerful to the core. Along with Yuka and the Tokitani siblings, he is part of a group of 'hard-working friends' who have been together more or less since before middle school. He deeply resents the path his father wants for him in life, and he is definitely in rebellion against the family business. While he is unaware of the Tokitani siblings' past, he is still the only person who can confront Kazuharu on completely equal terms in the game (for reasons that become obvious if you play the game). Miyamoto Yuuka- The other childhood friend besides Shouhei (and one of the heroines) she is a pin-up model who dreams of becoming an actress, working long hours after school toward that goal and ignoring her parents' skepticism. Yuuka is a bright and cheerful character with perhaps the most 'normal' viewpoint of the characters in the game, serving as a touchstone for the warped (understandably so) viewpoints of the other characters. That said, she is also in the entertainment business, so she isn't unfamiliar with the 'dark side'. However, it hasn't tainted her, as of yet. She has a strong will and is a dreamer at heart (whereas the others are mostly down to earth), contrasting her to the other characters on just about every point. Tanaka Neneko- A ferociously strong-willed senpai at both Kazuharu's work and at school, she is also the worst kind of boss, ordering him to do everything in five minutes. Raised in an unstable household where both her parents were frequently ill, her role model was her elder sister, who worked intensely hard to bring the family back together after the kids were briefly put into the system due to their parents' inability to work. Neneko works intensely hard, often getting exasperated reactions from Kazuharu (who works for money, only working hard when it is necessary or when it is part of the job). She is constantly smiling and is the older sister of the group, frequently ending up as the advisor when it isn't her path. Kawatsu Tsubasa- The game's main heroine, whose appearance is the catalyst for the events that create the game's story. Like Kazuharu and Shinobu, she has experienced both abandonment and abuse from her family (mostly psychological abuse), but unlike those two, she isn't really capable of anger, so she has no outlet to release her stress. Despite her fragile appearance, she is not weak-willed... she is simply the type that endures, bending with the wind rather than standing firm within it. Like both Kazuharu and Shinobu, she has an intense, deep well of love. However, she is also far more willing to believe in others than either of them is, unwilling to give up on others until she is driven beyond her ability to endure.

Semiramis no Tenbin (more of conventional modern family conflicts) Reminiscence (think a cold war between siblings)

You don't get an error message? If that's the case, make sure you installed the last official patch released. I'm pretty sure the initial version had game-killing bugs. Edit: Remember that if you installed the final append disc, you need to use the patch for the 2.00 version.

I've listened to/watched this one literally hundreds of times Beware foul language Edit: These are the games I base my sense of what a great musical score is... and just listening to this, you can tell why most VNs and modern games don't impress me at all, can't you? lol

Both the Akagoei and Reminiscence series have numerous fourth wall moments, though they are mostly random. I seem to recall Rewrite having some moments like that. Most games by Alcot have at least a few such moments.

Getchu.com when I can get dl copies from them, dlsite for older games.

Twitter is evil. Immediately erase it so that you can escape the chains of the monster that is big social media corporations.

After ten years playing VNs, you would think I would have completely lost faith in them by now, especially considering just how many I've played (744 not counting most of the nukige, replays and incomplete/dropped ones). Most VNs that aren't nukige are SOL-fests that exist solely to promote nostalgic fantasies about life in high school and getting into bishoujos' pants... not that that is an entirely horrible goal, but it isn't something I want to see five hundred times over. The romance is usually puerile and has no relation to reality, the characters have all their hard edges filed away by the needs of the archetype, and drama is used solely to add 'spice' (like one sprinkle of pumpkin spice, not cracked red pepper) to an otherwise endlessly sweet and bland recipe. So how is it that someone who has experienced that much essentially boring and pointless repetition of the same scenarios able to continue to enjoy VNs, even if he can't stand meaningless SOL anymore? At one time, it was a sense of duty, a belief that I was doing the community good by digging gems out of the piles of crap that are the SOL genre. I also had a sense of pride that I made an effort of objectivity that I have literally seen no one else attempt. I played games no one else bothered with because they didn't have the time or patience, and I did it because I thought someone looking at the games would want to know what they were getting into. I paid a price in a growing sense of bitterness, of boredom, and of a sense that I was forgetting the reason why I began to read fiction in the first place. I paid a price in people continually being trolls and trying to draw me into fights over my opinions on these games. I had people start reddits and send me pms being sympathetic about the very conversations they'd started (yes that happens). I also had people who respected what I was doing, and I knew there were people in the community who benefited from the fact that I was doing it. I watched VNs I had pushed get localizations and fantls (usually to my surprise), and I saw others that I had labeled as mediocre get hyped to a ridiculous degree. I tried to get other people to help with what I was doing, only to find that, without a reading speed similar to mine, it was too much of a burden on their lives and ate up the time to read the VNs they wanted to read. The bad generally outweighed the good immensely while I was doing VN of the Month, and even after, I found that the after-effects of my years of playing games I wasn't interested in personally had left me with scars I was unable to feel while my sense of duty was keeping me going. However, I can say that I still haven't given up on VNs. Why? The reason is ridiculously simple and at the same time profound (at least to me). I love the medium. For someone who likes an experience that combines the reading, visual input, and music without the need for a lot of input from the one experiencing it, VNs provide a unique storytelling experience. Books are great for the imagination and can send our souls exploring across landscapes that exist only in our own minds, but VNs provide a more filled-out framework for those who don't necessarily have the imagination to fill in all the gaps on their own, without rotting the imagination to the degree manga and anime do. I've been able to get people who had trouble reading books into VNs, then led them straight back to books and opened the world of imagination to them. I've seen people who had begun to feel the otaku community offered nothing more to them come alive again after playing a chuunige or a charage. I've picked up a random moe-looking VN and found a deep and compelling story that remains within me dozens of times. In the end, it is moments, experiences like that that keep me coming back, believing in the possibilities of VNs even now. It is the desire to find more such experiences that keeps me looking at new releases each month, and it is the belief that those experiences will never entirely vanish that keeps me from condemning the industry as a whole for the way it sabotages itself at times.

Ou no Mimi ni wa Todokanai's protagonist is articulate and intelligent. The girls all have good reasons for falling for him (mostly because he is all-around capable and clear-thinking, though he generally fakes being lazy during the day). Tsuisou no Augment is another good choice, though the protagonist is something of a chatterbox (internally and externally). The heroines definitely have solid reasons for falling for him, but the drama in the heroine paths is pretty gritty, so be prepared. Semiramis no Tenbin is another one where the protagonist is intelligent and tends to be decent at articulating his thoughts. Honestly, this one might give you some trouble, because, while the heroines have good reasons for falling for him (except Sunao, who I suggest you skip for the sake of your mental health), the paths several of the heroines take to get to that point are pretty twisted and warped. I will warn you that some of Semiramis's characters tend to have extremely cynical outlooks when it comes to romance, and some of the events can lead to cynicism when it comes to romance. Ojou-sama no Hanbun wa Ren'ai de Dekiteimasu has a great protagonist from your point of view, and it fulfills the latter condition (even if the main heroine's reason is a bit twisted and wrapped up in other emotions). However, I need to warn you in advance that he sleeps around a lot and can be amoral in the pursuit of his goals, so, despite the title, don't expect a pure SOL game. I know you said you don't like traps, but I went ahead and mentioned this one. Campus's Uso series. Mmm... the protagonist in this one, because of his hangups involving lies, is a careful and thoughtful speaker. At the same time, the heroines fall for him for solid but varied reasons, usually involving their personal hangups. Note: Because of the nature of finding heroines that actually have good reasons for falling for the protagonist, most charage are automatically knocked out of the running, lol. I'm not including ones where the sole reasons the heroine likes him is because they are osananajimi or because he sits next to them in class or some BS like that. Also, I'm avoiding ones where 'love at first sight' is an issue. For that matter, where there is an imouto who just blindly loves her oniichan.

It's not a primarily romance VN, but Narita Shinri in Hello Lady is about as poetic as you can get for a protagonist. The girls fight falling in love with him, but they generally have good reason for it (with the possible exception of Eru). Otome ga Tsumugu Koi no Canvas... the protagonist is articulate, and the heroines have good reasons for falling for him. However, he is also a trap. Tenshi no Hane o Fumanaide... The heroines generally have a good reason for falling for him, and he is pretty articulate. However, yet again, he is a trap. (for some reason, trap protagonists in mostly serious games tend to be more articulate than the average protagonist, probably because they have to take care with their speech) Edit: tbh, most straight SOL game protagonists just aren't articulate... lots of airheads and barely human people. Tsukommi protagonists are more likely to be articulate, but those were the three I thought of off the top of my head.

tbh, Kasumi is just unlikable from a chuunige-reader's point of view.

One thing with Dies Irae - and indeed a significant proportion of chuunige in general - is that the antagonists can have a tendency to overwhelm the protagonist's qualities. Ren has a few good points, but when it comes down to it, he is essentially the ultimate version of the type that 'just wants to return to normal life' and Kasumi is Victim A. For this reason, I skipped Kasumi's route entirely the first time I played Dies Irae and only reluctantly played it the second time. Reinhardt, on the other hand, is a grand character who, for all that he is very obviously evil, is also glorious in his own way. Mercurius, for all his evil, obviously loves Marie, even if he shows it in a really screwy way. The fact is, you have to see Kasumi as a symbol rather than a character, when it comes down to it, since her character is a fairly standard osananajimi type. Masada generally lavishes his full skills on descriptions of his villains/antagonists' internal qualities, their motivations, their pasts, etc. He actually seems to prefer the villainous characters over the 'good guys', as is shown in Paradise Lost, where everyone is evil to one degree or another, with the possible exception of Riliel (though this is only in the sense that she isn't malicious, not that she doesn't kill people). Lyle, the protagonist of Paradise Lost, is about as evil as they get, and most of the characters of Kajiri Kamui are also amoral or have a very strong dark side. This can also be seen in Senshinkan, where the protagonist and his closest friends were so much more boring than the antagonists and side-characters (with the possible exception of the main heroine, who has a really wonderfully twisted personality). Honestly, I just recommend you play the game through, then think on whether you liked the characters or not, since almost nobody is going to like Ren based on the events of Kasumi's path or the common route (he spends way too much time escaping from reality). Edit: Honestly, I've never met anyone who loved Dies Irae based on Ren or Kasumi. Most people just liked the antagonists and other heroines... or the writing and plot. I personally am fond of Ren, but, except for his weird hangups (the biggest of which is the one that defines his power), his desires are fairly standard for an early-era chuunige protagonist. The main reason you'll almost never see the untranslated readers criticize Dies Irae is because only chuunige-lovers ever play Dies Irae in Japanese. The game is as well-written as it gets, and the presentation is first-class, with great opposition characters. I can guarantee you that most of them think of the antagonists and the heroines first when they look back at the game, and Ren is probably an afterthought (except for the coupling with Rusalka, of course, since that was hugely popular). The sheer difficulty level of Dies Irae in Japanese meant that only people with the level of Japanese knowledge to be able to enjoy the first-class writing ever played the game in the first place, and generally only chuunige readers had that level of understanding. I have declined to comment on the recent discussions on whether Dies Irae is 'good' or not because, regardless of what I say in that matter, it will end up being disregarded because I am a chuunige-addict and a player of untranslated games. One thing that I should probably mention about my initial experience with Dies Irae was that, until I got through Marie's path, I experienced a great deal of frustration with the game and Ren and Kasumi. I have mentioned this in some of my blog posts, but I personally believe that Victim A type heroines should never be present in chuunige, meaning that, even though I understand her role in the game as a symbol of everyday life/what Ren wants from life, I still loathed Kasumi's presence in the game. For this reason, I've actually advocated in the past for skipping Kasumi's route entirely, since it doesn't add a whole lot to the story in comparison to Kei's route, which is actually a better intro in a lot of ways (Kei being a better heroine in general). I had to actually finish Marie's path before I was ready to like Ren as a character, and I liked him even more after Rea's path.

Chuuni Hime no Teikoku

Paradise Lost was the first game in Masada's/Light's 'Shinza series (Paradise Lost>Dies Irae>Kajiri Kamui Kagura). For the sake of those who read Dies Irae but still don't understand how this universe/setting works, I'll explain it in a spoiler box at the end of the post. Paradise Lost is based in the ruins of a city once called Sodom, now the Quarantine City, a city full of poisonous miasma that causes death and mutation in its inhabitants, a city sealed from the outside world by an impenetrable barrier, a city where Darwinism is the only law. All the denizens of that city are beasts, monsters who combine human cruelty with the lack of restraint of an animal. In that city, a man, sometimes named Lyle, at others Nacht, and at yet others Death Scythe, walks the streets of the darkest, most toxic area of the city, stained with the blood of those unfortunate enough to encounter him. That's my intro to one of Paradise Lost's two protagonists, Lyle. In a city where everyone is out for themselves, with no pretense of anything else, Lyle is a living legend, a monster who kills simply because he can, because he feels like it. Always at war with his even more violent alternative ego, Nacht, he searches for a past lost so long ago that it was forgotten by time itself. Frozen in place for years, time begins to move forward when he encounters the angel Ririel deep in the depths of the Dead Zone. The other protagonist, Knowe Christ, is a bit more comprehensible from the average human perspective. He is a young man who is on the lowest rung of the Quarantine City's societal ladder. Born with defects that make a life of violence impossible for him, he supports his adopted little sister Sophie by selling drugs and being a 'body chopper', selling his own body parts for enough money to feed them both. He loves Sophie dearly, and she is the only thing keeping him sane in the abyss that is that city. Paradise Lost is, like all Masada games, over the top and pretty much a perfect example of epic chuunige style (as opposed to the standard types, which are less melodramatic and grand in scale). In some ways, this game avoids everything that Masada normally does poorly (namely slice-of-life) entirely. It is pure story from beginning to end. There is no conflict between daily life and the darker struggle, because the struggle is merely an extension of that daily life. Both protagonists are dark by nature, though Knowe can be pretty frustrating for his surprising naivete (understandable, since he is a weakling by the standards of the city). This game has a lot of great fights and slaughter, and the actual story is pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the visuals are dated (though still pretty cool) and the protagonists aren't voiced, both of which are negatives for a chuunige (you would have thought Light would have fixed that when they re-released the game). There is only one truly good person in this entire VN (Ririel), and most of the characters in the game would be considered to be monsters by our moral standards. Both inside and outside of the city the world is a huge dystopia, with merely the vector differing. This game uses a lot of Christian apocrypha (as should be obvious, considering that Ririel is an angel) in the setting, but it is done in a way that should be pretty offensive to most Christians, lol (seriously, I don't think that Masada could have so thoroughly designed a blasphemous work even if he'd done so intentionally). While there are six endings to the game, it should be noted that there are only two possible overall outcomes, with the only differences between them being whether the endings are focused on Knowe's side (and one of his two heroines) or Lyle's side. Basically, the essential difference between the endings is determined by whether the antagonist succeeds or fails in his main goal (ironically, the antagonist succeeding creates the 'good' endings). Overall, this game is a great chuunige... but anyone who doesn't like chuunige won't like it, because there is literally nothing but chuunige content in this game.

There are only two paths in the game, one is the true/harem path, the other the joke path. No, there isn't as much SOL as Tiny Dungeon.

Semiramis no Tenbin Hatsuru Koto naki Mirai Yori Hyper→Highspeed→Genius Komorebi no Nostalgica