Decay

I like key's art style I don't mind the disproportional characteristics on their drawings I found them charming in a way and after so many years they are still drawing almost in the same way for a reason.

No, it is certainly trying to look right to a certain extent. Anime drawings are of course heavily exaggerated caricatures of the human body, but that doesn't mean it's impossible to draw poorly within that style. None of the critics here are wanting the drawings to be hyper realistic or anything. They just don't want hideous misshapen butts or one eye that droops lower on the face than another. Realism is not a factor, it's inconsistent and sloppy art that is the factor at hand.

Oh god I didn't notice the issue with Chihaya's right leg in that Rewrite CG until you pointed it out and now I can't unsee it. It's hideous. Every Hinoue drawing is like a treasure trove of anatomical oddities.

The Fabula Nova Crystallis series turned out to be a clusterfuck. Agito ended up getting renamed, redesigned, and was released as Type 0. The Wikipedia article says that Type 0 shares the same "mythos" as 13, but that is its only relation. In reality, it's pretty much completely unrelated to 13 in any tangible way (it's even set in a different world). To add to the confusion, Square made a small IOS/Android companion game to Type 0 titled Final Fantasy Agito, which again has nothing to do with FF13 and is just some small side-game to go alongside Type 0. Agito+ was going to be a Vita port of that mobile game, but there's currently no sign of it. It is probably never going to come out in English, but it's of no importance anyways. Versus 13 was transformed into 15 and it now has nothing to do with that universe. The FF13 sequels are obviously canon to FF13, and take place sequentially.

The story, oh god the story. It doesn't just get better, it gets totally fucking bonkers. In simultaneously the worst and best ways. Especially in MGS2. This is praise, if you couldn't tell. It's definitely a very dated game, however.

They are the same, except for how one looks infinitely better than the other. The neck on the green haired girl is a little on the long side but I give it a pass because everything else is fine. I have no other criticisms of it, no misshapen skulls or misproportioned facial features or messed up senses of perspective or anything else like that.

Yeah, it's my understanding that A5 will be the last Majikoi thing. But most of what Takahiro does is pretty similar, his previous Tsuyokiss series has more than a passing resemblance to Majikoi. And his next game looks good, too.

This is a game from the year 1999 (https://vndb.org/v177): This predates Kanon. Age is not really an excuse. Well, you can say that MOST of the competition did look bad back then and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but that's because nobody bothered spending money on competent artists except a select few studios such as Leaf. The fact that there were more incompetent artists back then than now doesn't make me want to accept incompetent art. edit: Although I praise Leaf, To Heart looked baaaaad. So they also had their rough "can't afford anyone competent" phase, but they managed to get out of that quickly. edit 2: Changed to a better example.

The line art always seemed really rough to me, like the artist had a bad grasp on anatomy and just couldn't draw people very well. Masato may be one of the biggest examples of this. His sprite suuuuucks. Like the way his shoulder slope and that kind of thing. Their art has gotten progressively better over time, but Clannad and older VNs just kind of look rough. The other big issue I take with their art style is how the hair is attached to the head. It often makes no anatomical sense, like the hair is mismatched with the skull. There are several sprites like this even in Clannad. It's this kind of thing that makes it less of an art style thing and more that it's simply poorly drawn. Also they're still hilariously bad at drawing old people. LOL at Esaka's sprite in Rewrite. edit: Also it's not necessarily the size of the eyes that bother me, that's largely fine. I actually kind of like the eyes in Clannad, LB, and Rewrite, they're kinda pretty, but it's their placement. The characters look like they have downs. This is also something Key has gotten better at over time.

I assume whatever translator they have on board is going to do them. A translator wanting to work on Walkure Romanze but not on h-scenes would be pretty bizarre, like half of the appeal of the game is the H, (as is like half of the script. )

Dengeki Stryker kind of fits the bill, except it's the reverse. Manga characters suddenly find themselves in the real world, including the protagonist. It's superhero themed. I found it pretty amusing, but the action is a bit stale and generic. Make sure you get the updated/expanded version, Cho Dengeki Stryker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFr6uFYH7Hg I freaking love this song, and I loved Sunset Rubdown, RIP Sunset Rubdown. Their music was so fun to listen to.

For a good eight or more years now I've been following Let's Plays in various forms. What is a Let's Play you ask? Is this your first day on the internet, I ask? Let's Play was originally a way to play through a game with input from a community, done in the form of screenshots with text commentary posted to message boards, and was popularized on the Something Awful forums in 2006. They would play through a whole game from start to finish in that manner. In 2007, it evolved to video form there, and once Youtube stopped being terrible in its early days, it exploded in popularity across the whole internet. Nowadays, Let's Play and Let's Play derivatives are incredibly diverse in content, style, and format. For the purposes of this thread, let's just say any kind of regular gaming video content counts. I will now go over some of my favorite youtube and twitch channels. Men Drinkin' Coffee: An absolutely hilarious, often satirical (see: name) group of hobbyist LPers originating from the Something Awful forums but also doing some content purely on their youtube channel. In my opinion, they may be the single funniest group out there doing this thing, but are still small-time enough that they only do a new series every now and again, with an irregular schedule. One of their hallmarks is how they always seem to be having a good time, even when playing the worst games. Their enjoyment is contagious. Their funniest and most popular series is for the amazingly bad Ride to Hell: Retribution. Their latest series has them judging various Kickstarter projects and the first one they do is highly pertinent to Fuwanovel's interests and contains a healthy dose of culture shock. Everyone here should at least watch the second linked video just for that bit of amusement alone: Dslyecxi: I love this guy. A former marine (albeit a trainer, never seeing front-line duty), he currently runs the Shacktac group of gamers. Shacktack's main purpose is to gather people for highly organized, complex Arma missions. Expect plenty of milsim spergery. But also expect plenty of highly intense videos that are fascinating to watch. These guys take the game mega seriously with huge player counts, fully simulated command structures, radio systems, etc, but they have a great time doing it, and Dslyecxi is a great player and team leader, making him really fun to watch. His videos can sometimes be a bit slow, this is definitely an acquired taste, but when they get going they really go, and they showcase a style of gaming almost none of us will ever experience first-hand. Beaglerush: A former Shacktac member, he now does something completely different. XCOM videos. Yes, the slow, boring-to-watch strategy game XCOM. Except they're great, and the game is way better to watch than you might expect. Beagle is a great sense of humor and his XCOM series always tell a great story that's fun to follow along with. Also, he happens to be incredibly good at the game, able to go toe-to-toe with it on the hardest difficulty, playing with a mod that enhances the difficulty even further. I'm a bit of a tactics and strategy nut, and could honestly watch videos of good strategy gamers all day, but I don't even think you have to be that to appreciate Beagle. He's a funny guy and he manages to make XCOM an entertaining game to watch. He's active on both Youtube and Twitch, providing a ton of content if you watch at both places. Also, his old Shacktac stuff when he was active there is good, too, but I already talked enough about that. Yogscast: Oh boy, how freaking mainstream of me . What am I, a 12 year old Minecraft-obsessed brat? Everyone knows these guys, they make mad bank crapping out a 15 minute minecraft video a day. I actually wouldn't mind if I never saw another Minecraft series again, and I kind of hate Simon. But, that said, I still genuinely enjoy the dynamic between Lewis, Duncan, and Sjin in their modded series, previously Skyblock and now Blast Off. Their banter together is actually really funny, and their videos are the kind that I can put in the background and enjoy while doing other things, occasionally checking in. Giant Bomb: Huh? Does this count, can I do this?? It's my thread I do what I want. These guys are great, and easily my favorite people in all of the gaming press. They've helped pioneer a new kind of gaming press and their main focus is on regular video content. They do some complete game playthroughs, but they also do a lot of one-off "Quick Looks". Their Persona 4 Endurance Run back from 2009 where they played through the entirety of Persona 4 in over 150 episodes is a classic series that I still go back to watch through from time to time. They're hilarious people, my favorites being Jeff and Vinny. Almost all of the most entertaining gaming videos I have ever seen have come from these guys. They also run a great weekly audio podcast. I don't expect some of this stuff to be to everyone's taste, but I wanted to give a window to what I've been watching with my free time when not starting yet another Hearthstone arena run or trying to finish up Majikoi. What about you guys? Please share with us what kind of Let's Play or general youtube gaming videos you've been watching lately. Or just chat about them, what you like and don't like in an LP. i'm pretty interested to see where the tastes of the Fuwanovel community lies. edit: Dang, broke the youtube embed limit, we're off to a great start!

I saw romanesque ads on 4chan and nyaa.

Said like a true millennial. "What's a porn mag? Can you torrent it?"

I believe it, F/SN is really long. Most 50+ hour VNs are longer than the LOTR trilogy. I believe the last GRRM novel was longer than the entire trilogy, too, each book was only a few hundred pages.

If someone is already objecting to porniness just by looking at a picture of a fully clothed anime woman, bringing up Saya no Uta is not going to go well. Even if you manage to somewhat justify it by saying "it's like Game of Thrones" and they seemingly accept that, they'll still be skeptical and think you're weird. And it's not like game of thrones, because game of thrones isn't explicit and pornographic. you don't have closeups of penetration and 10-minute-long scenes full of every last detail. But I guess if you lie to them and tell them it's like game of thrones, it's more palatable. Just hope they never investigate further and find out it's actual literal pornography. If you want to convince someone who is down on the concept of visual novels, don't even bring up the porn. Don't even mention games with it. Talk about Little Busters as a rousing tale of youth and friendship, or Steins;Gate as a compelling sci-fi thriller.

I haven't played Seinarukana, but I've played Aselia and Yumina. I understand that Seinarukana is generally considered to have better gameplay than those, but they still underwhelmed me in that department. Same story with every other H-RPG I've played. Kamidori is inferior to many grid based SRPGs, Rance is inferior to most proper first person dungeon crawlers, Sengoku Rance wasn't as good as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Nobunaga's Ambition games, and so on. So my general impression of these games is that once you take out the H, you're left with a pretty middling experience. I'm not trying to crap on H-RPGs as a concept, I see the merit they hold, but if you try to make them go toe-to-toe with other games on Steam, I wonder if the audience will stick around after the first couple releases. Even disregarding the competition on steam, how likely is it that someone will look at an all-ages version of Seinarukana and think "So it's like a crappier version of Ogre Battle?" Or maybe they'll go "Oh, it's like Ogre Battle and there is barely anything else like that." I don't know, really. I think Doddler put it well when he said why MangaGamer doesn't go after that genre very aggressively. If the game designers responsible for these were good enough to stand toe-to-toe with non-ero games, they'd just work on those instead because the pay is better and there's more fame in it for them. It seems to me that H-games are kind of like the minor leagues of japanese game development. If you're telling me that the only chance they stand are to have alternate all-ages versions on Steam or else they're done for in the west, I can only respond that then they don't stand a chance at all. It would be like making a minor league team compete in the majors. Sakura Spirit is not a valid point of comparison, it's a completely different kind of experience. And it will also end up outselling Seinarukana by a large margin if that ever makes it onto steam. Note, there may be a few h-games that defies everything I've said and are brilliant experiences. If there are, it hasn't been translated into english, and it doesn't look like Seinarukana will be that either.

I've been playing a lot of The Talos Principle lately. I'm seriously really impressed. The puzzle gameplay is addicting and it's challenging if you want to 100% it. It's really fun to explore all of the levels in order to find the hidden stuff. And the story is greatly intriguing and heavily philosophical. It will make you ponder the nature of humanity and what makes a person, the role of god and religion in the world, and the impact technology will have on our lives in the future, all without being pretentious about it and without preaching. Japanese video games go super overboard on the preaching and pretension whenever they attempt to get philosophical. This is a much more sane and intriguing way to broach the subject matter, in my opinion, it handles it surprisingly well. I guess a comparison is that most Japanese video games feel like adolescent chuuni-fueled rants while The Talos Principle feels like a mature treatise on philosophy. But the bulk of the experience is the gameplay. The other plus is that despite being what seems to be a simple puzzle game, it's huge with a crapload of content. It may take you 20-30 hours to 100% depending on how good you are at puzzle solving. Portal 2 was what, 4 hours for the single player?

Answer 1: "Well ACTUALLY," *adjusts fedora* "you should appreciate the grand literary depth present within this threesome scene featuring my two waifus, Saber and Rin." Answer 2: "You think THAT is porny? Get a load of this! https://vndb.org/v1292" Answer 3: "Touché" I'd probably go with something alongside answer 3. I can recognize that visual novels aren't for everyone and they're honestly kind of like a guilty pleasure for me. When presented with "why not read a book instead" the answer is honestly "Because I'm a huge dork and I like these cheesy stories." Like, he's not actually wrong, but that doesn't make visual novels a medium without merit.

You can play the routes in any order you want. A guide is largely unnecessary because route selection is really trivial, you just choose the heroine you want in the selection phase over and over again. Once you complete all five main heroine routes, you unlock the Agave route, I suggest finishing up all of the side routes before starting that and making that the last route you read.