[Give me the most brutal, horrific, fucked up titles this planet has to offer.]

I'm in a hunt for the most violent and horrific VNs imaginable, give me something that'll make my mind so incredibly screwed that I'll lose sleep for days. Thankfully, I'm a weak person at heart, that way I can have PTSD more easily

[What is a game's quality? Is it objective?]

This might sound pedantic but I always wanted to have this discussion with people LOL.

People often say about how quality =/= popular, but then what's quality exactly? Is it something objective and intrinsic to the game?(Because popularity is exactly that).

I mean, there are some things that generally, people might judge as bad quality, one thing are inconsistencies in the plot (Plot Holes), but what if someone thinks that plot holes make his favorite game better? Can we really tell him "Bah you and your tastes are wrong"? Another thing is lack of production values (a.k.a lack of money), if everything in the scenario is bland then that's generally criticized as poor quality, but take Higurashi for example, Ryukishi07 draws his characters like a kindergarten, then Mangagamer(?) came and made everything more detailed with more colors and voices, but some people disliked that, and prefer the original game entirely. What makes quality an objective thing then? "What generally people think" still means that there's something subjective there.

[Whats the appeal of ntr?]

Actually, is there any NTR story where the MC has a "macho man" stereotype? I have a feeling that in most of them he's just a pathetic beta loser, and "less of a man" than the bastard stealing his girlfriend.

[Whats the appeal of ntr?]

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People who try bringing fantasies like this into reality are the fucked ones

Nah man, some people live happily like that, I saw an interview with a porn actor and he likes being a cuckold, and his wife won't leave him apparently since she's married to him. It might sound strange for people like us who get jealous easily, but some people live happily like that.

And of course there are other cases where it happens exactly what you described, one of the partners regret it and the relationship is destroyed, it involves risk no doubt.

[Whats the appeal of ntr?]

No no, unless it is NTR  .  The art of cuckolding where your girlfriend changes you and your tiny dick for a bastard who screws her all day, that's for dickless boys hahaha. 

[Antiheroine/different moral principles compared to human ones]

Is it allowed spoilers?

Spoiler

Rewrite.

 

[JP romance VN's where atmosphere is somber or serious?]

Wow thanks for asking Larxe1, I also need games like that and this thread just gave me what I needed, nice.

[Need some recommendations for 'PLOT-TWIST']

Chaos; Child

 

[Is sharing a freeware game deleted by its author(s) accetable?]

Yeah I think it depends.

Legally I think at the time the game is published, the author cannot have the full control of the game at those terms, for any reason (and I have my fair share of criticism towards copyrights laws, but that's another matter). So in this context, people shouldn't ever be sent to jail for that.

Legality aside, I think it's considered a bit rude towards the author to not delete it when he asked. It depends on what's his reason for it, on a hypothetical case, if the author wants his work deleted just because it received bad reviews, then I think that's lame on his part.

If it's a more serious reason, then yeah I would consider it very rude.

Another issue is the popularity of the game, if it's very obscure then we wouldn't miss it, and the author's wish might be easily granted.

If it's hugely popular, then I'm sorry but I would not side with the author, regardless of his reason (maybe), a lot of people have great experiences in their lives with these games, it might sound silly but that's how I honestly see it  .

Another point to reflect is why should we tie the author so strongly (almost "spiritually") to the game? At the moment that he shares his story, it might not be important only to him anymore, lots of people feel strongly attached to any work of fiction emotionally, and this is not a bad thing, so why granting the author almost a monopoly on that department? I mean, there are a lot of fans of Harry Potter that regard the series as much more important to their lives then J.K Rowling herself, and we don't discuss if these same people should have a say if HP should be published or not. "Oh but he's the one who created it", Yeah but why? Why creating the thing in the first place is this big of a deal? I'm starting to reflect on it, because if the answer to my last question is about "emotional attachment to the work", then I already have my opinion on that.

 

[Whats the appeal of ntr?]

I think this is for crazy people , NTR always makes me depressed and sad, and when it's fetishized then it makes me feel weird.

I actually accidentally came across some NTR stories in manga and it made me hella angry, so to take my revenge on that, I picked on REVERSE NTR games, and man I found them pretty hot. Watching the MC being emasculated with his girlfriend being stolen, that's a no no for me, but I can easily find pleasurable to watch the MC stealing another guy's woman, or cheating on his girlfriend, muahahahaha (unless it's a more serious story, any kind of cheating makes me sad when it's played for drama).

[Basically, how much can VNDB scores be trusted?]

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Now if there was a VN in which the heroine actually has feelings that can change based on how you treat her

I never saw anything like that in any VN (don't know about dating sims, never played them), but it would be very interesting, from what I played, the closest I found was school days, the game has a bar on the screen that measures how close you are to one of the main heroines, and depending on how you treat them they may "hate" you or love you to the fullest.

Probably your average VN doesn't have a bad ending with the heroine, and if it does, generally it isn't based on how you treat them, I might be wrong though.

[Basically, how much can VNDB scores be trusted?]

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to this day I don't get what the problem with NTR is, honestly

Nah man, we understand if you like to be cucked, what matters is that everybody is happy  

[Basically, how much can VNDB scores be trusted?]

You can trust, they make an effort to get rid of troll votes (e.g. people who make multiples accounts in order to inflate or downgrade a particular VN's score, and people who score without playing the game, those are the only problems I can think of).

[Looking for something clever]

Chaos;Child: The mystery is quite intriguing and exciting, you'll really like this one, the protagonist might come off as a bit of a wimpy at first but he is not, he makes the story work and has his shining moments:https://vndb.org/v14018

G-Senjou no Maou: Awesome game with an awesome mystery, I prefer this one over Chaos;Child, the revelations and twists are better in my opinion, and the MC has a more proactive personality and is cooler:https://vndb.org/v211

Ever17-The Out of Infinity: This one is NOT ABOUT DETECTIVES or characters trying to solve a mystery, it happens something bad to them, and the reasons behind are the big mystery of the game that keeps you in it, but the characters themselves rarely go out of their way trying to figure out why that happened to them, who is behind everything etc, and when something odd happens they shrug it off quite quick, so no one plays the detective role here, play the previous two if you want characters like that, but the mystery is present here and the twist is a huge surprise, so I recommend:https://vndb.org/v17

[What are you playing?]

Just finished Chaos;Child, great game which I really enjoyed the twists and the mystery, the impactful scenes were also very well done, but there are so many questions in my head, I didn't understand a lot of the things that happened, about the delusions and stuff, my only issue is that it's not my type of game  , since there is NO ROMANCE at all:

 

Spoiler

There is only one confession in one of the routes (didn't read all of Hana and Kazuki because meh), but Takuru never starts dating her (Hinae), in Senri's route it's not clear if they start seeing each other as lovers, their relationship is too sibling-ish.

And about the true ending, it's fine having a kind of sad ending, actually I found the true ending well-written, it's just not my type of ending since Takuru ends up alone, so meh, in Rewrite for example Akane's route doesn't end 100% happy, but I loved that a lot since Kotarou stays beside the woman of his life, in C;C Takuru ends up completely alone, even his friends are gone for good, so it didn't have that much of an impact in me emotionally, just read and thought "yeah cool".

Well, that aside, I recommend the game for anyone, the atmosphere and the twists are very good, and some of the characters also, and the ARTSTYLE  .

[Learning Japanese]

Okay, I understood what you're trying to say about putting pieces together with kanji, and I appreciate your advice, but I already tried this method of studying kanjis separately, and it didn't work, learning only the words first and by consequence the kanji is easier for me in my current level, but I'll try it when I become more advanced, what you said makes sense and you probably think like that because you already know quite a bunch.

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Old english might be different from current english however the letters themselves are quite similar, they didn't suddenly add some hebrew or korean symbols to just throw into the mix or anything

Thing is, this is exactly what happened with Japanese, they imported the chinese characters to their writings, and it happened in different regions in Japan independently, this is one of the reasons that you see a lot of kanjis having different readings instead of only one (the ideal world), and also for there to be about 50,000 kanjis, but "only" 2136 are recognized by the Ministry of Education, and probably only a bit more of 400 are essential in your average text, so yeah, what I see here is Japan suddenly adding a lot of new characters into their mix.

And, they already have to learn the Latin alphabet anyway, they live with it normally in computer keyboards and media, it's not something alien to them, actually what it's happening recently is that the younger people in Japan don't even know how to write kanji, they only type something in the keyboard and the kanji magically appears, so what I foresee in the future is kanjis becoming gradually more obsolete, I might be wrong of course, but I bet 2 cents on this.

[Learning Japanese]

Bakachuujin, Thank you for the big reply.

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 for instance if any store want to promote something they can use the kanji for it in big letters, but if they have to write with hiragana or romanji they have to write sentences to ensure people understand what it is actually about.

Yeah maybe, but I find this a really minor problem, and easy to solve, actually I don't see much difference between Japan and the western in this regard, google "advertisement in japan", you'll se a lot of symbols and even romaji, but okay if you say so.

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There is also the loss of kanji word play and such which is quite important in japanese literature, anything by Nision Isin for instance would lose quite a lot of flavour without playing off kanji.

Okay, but again I find this a really minuscule problem, the same way we won't be able to make jokes like this:https://www.wish.com/br/product/chinese-kanji-sex-fck-funny-doggy-style-jdm-sticker-for-car-suv-truck-window-bumper-vinyl-decal-5b9d2a19706d4449da3e2d8b?hide_login_modal=true&share=web, it is kind of sad that these kinds of jokes might disappear, but only a few care.

In my opinion what we have to gain from switching kanji to romaji is bigger then what we have to lose, think about how easier will be for foreigners to go to Japan, get decent jobs and build awesome things there.

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One problem is that words are made up of multiple kanji, by understanding what a kanji means you can understand words that you haven't encountered before and it gives you a better understanding of how words in japan is made in general which gives you a much better graps of the basics behind large parts of the language. Understanding the basics which builds up a language helps you become much better at it than just memorizing things.

Sorry man but I didn't quite understand what you're trying to say here, are you saying that in order to understand more japanese grammar, you need to know kanji? (you didn't use the word grammar and were vague instead, so I'll interpret that way) Sorry but how? Kanjis were just imports from the chinese writing system that happened throughout hundreds of years in various places in Japan, so they were really confusing even inside Japan, each region had its different kanjis for the same words than other regions etc, they are in Japan by pure chance at least, it is just how history writes itself, if by "understanding the basics of the language" you mean its history than that's only what it is, history, the science of how the language evolved.

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Also if you add spaces which you would have to do it would I think the particles would be quite awkward to read, basically reading text would be quite odd due to the way in which japanese sentences are built up.

Disagree, being "awkward" is 100% subjective, particles are basically the same as articles and prepositions from western languages from a visual point of view, I actually prefer romaji to hiragana in this regard because of the particle は, which can be read as "ha" and "wa" and this confuses me sometimes since there is no space in japanese sentences, so spotting the particle は for beginners is a bit tricky, and the same happens with  へ, with romaji this problem disappears.

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If somehow this actually did still go through and worked decently enough it would likely cause a culture war in Japan though. Anyone who doesn't learn kanji will have a worse grasp on the laguage as they don't understand the individual parts words are made up of and thus won't be able to understand words they haven't encountered yet where others could understand it based on how the kanji is put together.

You're the first person who tells me this, until now every material I read and every one who learned Japanese told me that when it comes to kanji you learn the words, and not the kanji itself, how did you learn that 日本人 is read as nihonjin? Did you study each kanji separately? Or did you just went straight to the word?

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They will also be unable to read lots of literature as some books are likely not to get translation treatment due to lack of popularity or at the very least they will not understand word play based on kanji.

Yeah I know, you're right, but look, this is a problem of the present, in the future we won't know if these books will remain untranslated forever, I assume here you're talking about books in the present, this is when freedom of choice comes at hand, nowadays, of course Japanese people won't abruptly switch to romaji if the government makes kanji optional, they're already used to their system, the majority of texts are written in kanji, this is something that takes time to change, how did English evolve until its current state? In the middle of this process people started innovating, writing differently, speaking differently, all this in order to suit their needs, the same would happen in Japan, if it happens to be better for them to switch to romaji, this process will take slowly.

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Them not learning kanji would also require basically every part of society to accommodate for them by adding writing by the alphabeth to everything. This would likely make anyone who choose not to learn kanji to be seen as lesser people as they force the society to do a lot of shit so that they themselves can be lazy while they also reject the japanese history and heritage as well as their lazynes having an impact on their ability to understand japanese on a fundamental level. Basically I think anyone who were to choose this would be scorned by the society.

No, as I said earlier, this process is a slow one, nobody has the duty to satisfy the needs of people as myself who are lazy to learn kanji, this won't happen from the use of force, but from the use of choices being made every day by individuals during decades , the same way modern languages evolved until today, have you ever seen old english? It is incomprehensible for the modern English speakers, so how did one turn into another without confusing people? No idea.

[Learning Japanese]

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ifyouremoveallkanjijapanesewillbesomewhatlikethisandthisispainfulenoughtoreadanditsonlyonesentencelongseriouslyyoudontwantthat

You're right, but actually what I want is romaji. Or at least to start introducing some spaces in hiragana, better than having kanji all over the places, I think it might happen in the next 200 years  .

Just for the record, how many people here are able to read an entire Visual Novel without ANY furigana? And how many years did you take to reach this level? I just want to have an idea of how many years will take until I become one of these masters (hopefully), until now I only memorized some basic words like 私 or 日本語 and some numbers, actually this is the trick with kanjis, you don't learn them, you learn words, each kanji can have more than 4 readings, and if you see them in a word you might not know how to read.

[Learning Japanese]

57 minutes ago, Yuuko said:

This whole thread:

  Reveal hidden contents

Trust me you do not want to read Japanese without kanji

 

Trust me, I know what I want, just saying "without kanji there would be a lot of problems" without stating what are these problems is not convincing, until now the only reason someone gave me is the homonyms which I disagree because context solves this.

And I'm sorry I think I spread misinformation in a previous comment:

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I read somewhere that the Japanese people wanted at some point to use the Latin alphabet in order to facilitate people's lives, but no, the government had to step in and force them to continue using kana

No, I don't know who made this proposal in Japan in the early periods, it could be some individuals in Japan wanting it by their own volition. Or it could be from the government itself. At some point it was an advisor in the Occupation administration, so it's not Japanese people themselves. Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system#Meiji_period

I'm sorry.

[Learning Japanese]

34 minutes ago, bakauchuujin said:

In that case I think the easier solution for them would just be to scrap japanese and go over to english as their native language.

Yes, just to take things further, I believe EVERY COUNTRY in this world should make optional to its people which language they should learn, and then people would choose the best option for them, independently of what language they would choose, if it happens to be English, so be it, in the Japanese case, if they just want to change the writing system, awesome, if they want to learn English, awesome, if they don't change anything, awesome, I will only have to accept in this case, but switching Japanese to English would take  A LOT of time, cultural changes this large take a lot of time, or don't even happen, so I find this unlikely, changing the writing system is feasible since they already have to learn the Latin alphabet either way (it's mandatory also for them, but what they must use normally is the traditional system), and even this would take a lot of time, you would need to see more foreigners going there and build their schools, their structure, become closer to Japanese people, some of them would try to build companies to make easier to hire foreigners, some others would be conservative and would keep their distance from this type of thing, a lot of things would happen, these things is what built the world as we know right now, and continue building.

[Learning Japanese]

"Oppressed" is a strong word in this case, but just to clarify, yes, I believe if they were given the choice to choose between the traditional system and the western system then a lot of them would choose the western because I believe it would be easier for them in international relations, companies etc, for example you see a lot of companies in Japan using Latin letters in their logo (SONY, nintendo, Sega, Honda), but I honestly don't know, I just guess they would start using the Latin alphabet, the younger ones in Japan don't even know how to write Kanji manually, despite the government making mandatory the calligraphy classes because "they NEED to know because yes".

[Learning Japanese]

I don't want to have any power either way, I want for Japanese people to choose whatever writing system they want, including Latin, Russian, Korean, whatever, instead of forcing them to learn and use the traditional system, I want them to be given a choice, which they will face everyday, and not "let's make a referendum and see what system we'll make mandatory for the next 50 years", no, it has to be a free option in every moment, and then people will start deciding what will be better and easier for their lives.

Banishing kana and kanji is out of the question for me, no, it should be OPTIONAL .

[Learning Japanese]

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Many words in japanese would be written the same way using the alphabeth or hiragana as each other and without kanji you would not be able to figure out the word 

This is what we call homonyms, it happens often in English but we're able to figure out the word because context, it would be the same in japanese, if what you say is true then in the spoken language people would misunderstand each other often since there is no kanji to guide them.

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Yes kanji is far more advanced than the alphabeth, however there are structural things about the language that differs greatly from other languages, just because other languages works with the alphabeth does not mean it will work with japanese

I disagree, what structures are you talking about? If it is about the homonyms then no, I disagree because of the above reasons, if it is the phoneme then also no, my mother language for instance has very similar sounds to Japanese, and the language works just as fine with the latin alphabet.

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there are still numerous problems with getting rid of kanji

What problems? Please state them.

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Basically if you want japanese to get rid of kanji you would either have to make a new language for japan force them to use it

No man, please understand, what I want is for the Japanese government to make the traditional writing system OPTIONAL for its people, OPTIONAL, so they can use the Latin alphabet IF THEY WANT, right now Japanese people are FORCED TO USE kana and kanji, and this is what I find wrong, or at least, a nuisance for both Japanese people and for foreigners who want to learn their language.

[Learning Japanese]

9 hours ago, adamstan said:

In the beginning every JP learner moans that we should get rid of kanji, (and, as shown above, some would want to axe kana as well ), but afterwards most start to appreciate them. They actually make texts easier to read (provided you know the words of course) - longer kana-only texts are very tedious to read, since they are difficult to parse. And then there's an awful lot of homophones.

Sorry man, I wanted to say kanji (my brain got some ERROR, but I edited my comment), but making kana optional for Japanese people would be good also, I disagree with what people stated in this thread that kana is more useful to japanese than romaji (if you think like that, then give me some arguments), and the reason is the lack of space between words, but aside from that they're pretty much the same as latin letters, only meaning sounds, I find kana worse than say, korean hangul, because they use two systems, hiragana and katakana, instead of using only one of them, this is my bigger problem with kana, since this only overcomplicate things. But you can learn it fast in a couple of days, it's not THAT BIG of a deal, but when it comes to kanji? Pfft, this is THE WORRSSTTT, I hope in the future kanji will be only optional in Japanese texts, in order to facilitate our lives.

[Learning Japanese]

I don't want to sound obvious here, but have you ever learned another language before Japanese? If yes, try to remember how you did that, and replicate most of the steps you found effective to Japanese, when you learn the first language the others become easier , anyway, each one here gave good advices, the only thing different in Japanese is their different writing system, so you'll need to read A LOT, this actually is what outrages me the most about the language, they have more than one thousand symbols being used in written texts, I find this absurd especially for foreigners, I read somewhere that the Japanese people wanted at some point to use the Latin alphabet in order to facilitate people's lives, but no, the government had to step in and force them to continue using kana, GRRRRR, this makes me really mad, I hope in the future the Japanese government will make kanji optional rather than mandatory.