Decay

Steampunk fantasy: Sekien no Inganock, Shikkoku no Sharnoth. These are two great VNs by the same company, in the same series, highly recommended. Another game in the series, Ourai no Gahkthun, is currently in the process of being officially translated by MangaGamer. Cyberpunk Sci-Fi: I/O Revision II. Interesting cyberpunk thriller. A bit overwrought at times. Time travel Sci-Fi: Steins;Gate. Is generally regarded as one of the best translated VNs available. Modern fantasy (Chuuni, like Fate/Stay Night): Comyu. A dysfunctional group gains an ability to summon a monstrous creature, gets sucked into a world where there are other such groups. Ayakashibito. Japanese mythology meets the modern world, with plenty of martial arts and superpowered combat. Of these that I mentioned, Comyu and Ayakashibito have lengthy individual heroine routes not dissimilar to a standard bishoujo game, but romance is not the primary factor in them. Steins;Gate has a little bit of that too, but they're super short branches.

I would definitely say that matchup is the biggest factor, skill the second biggest, and luck is a distant third. Luck evens out over time, and you have to play a lot of matches to reach high ranks. You would need lottery-winning luck in order to purely ride the RNG to the top. Most likely, you found a netdeck that countered the meta very well and got used to playing it well.

lol at anyone who gets salty when playing in casual, a game mode with zero consequences for losing and is filled with stupid gimmick decks. Like, what was that guy expecting?

The PSP version's localization was actually a little shaky, but xseed put in the effort to give that huge script another pass just for the PC release, and did a bang-up job with it.

Those questions were rhetorical, although your memory of gelbin is better than mine . It's more about the principle of it, I don't like that there are things that must either be researched out of the game or experienced through trial and error. A game like this shouldn't have trial and error be a thing, you should know how everything works at a glance even if you're new. I just think if there was an in-game way to get this information it would be a good thing for new players.

By next year you mean next month.

There are other cards like that, too. Can you list all of the Dream cards? What exactly does Gelbin Mekkatorque do? Death to ambiguous card text. I get Blizzard doesn't want to overwhelm the player but there has to be a better way. Well, at least I'm sure you won't forget now that it happened once to you.

The translation for this has had a real rocky road but it's good to see that it's finally near the end of said road and everyone involved is now in good spirits. Looking forward to the game quite a bit. I ought to finish the first one some time.

I actually liked Umineko's question arcs just as much as the core arcs, or maybe even a little more. I liked some of the new characters introduced (Erika), disliked some of the others (Dlanor) and thought how they handled debate on the game board got a little too cheesy. But man, Erika is so good it pretty much canceled out all of the bad additions. This is going off-topic so instead I'll just say to the OP that don't worry about Umineko having a bad start or anything, it's really great from the get-go IMO.

That's probably because you were already at least aware of what the format was, I assume. Considering GameInformer's audience, I expect most readers of that article to be the former group rather than the later.

Planetarian is probably not the best title to recommend to total beginners. It's better to stick to ones that have gameplay or are at least lightly interactive for people who are totally uninitiated.

The sad part is that this is actually believable. Peter Payne...

Not if you're english-only, the translation is incomplete and stops early in the story.

Holy smokes, Blizzard has outdone themselves:

There's no way a site like Game Informer would ever mention or advertise eroge. Fan translations lay in a murky grey area so you can also imagine why they might not want to mention those, either. This leaves only totally legally available all-ages title, and I think they did decently within those restraints.

I dunno, playing on the ladder tends to bore me. Every time I try to rank up I get to like rank 12 or 10 and then get sick of it and go back to playing arena, which I find much more fun. Thankfully I'm able to go infinite in the arena (I make more gold than I spend) so I just play that non-stop.

Well, it's not a pure VN, it's a VN/RPG hybrid. The story sequences are VN-like and frequent enough to consider that an important part of the package.

I tried playing Rebirth, I got a headache after an hour. The dialog is sooo bad. Gameplay is meh. I guess chalk this up as another series whose popularity I will never understand. PC gamers should rejoice, Windows versions of Noire and U have been rated by the ESRB, so it seems likely that they'll come to Steam.

I think MangaGamer and JAST only very rarely has the uncensored CGs redrawn. There is a lot of uncensored eroge that have really terribly drawn genitals, and it's really apparent when artists take the easy way out (which isn't necessarily wrong). In this case, it seems like there is practically nothing underneath the mosaics, Front Wing apparently took that easy way out to an even bigger extreme, outright omitting some parts. It wouldn't only look crude, it would be comically bad. To some degree, if the genitals are crudely drawn, leaving in mosaics can enhance the eroticism. Like how censoring out random words in regular speech can make it seem filthy, or blurring out an act of light violence in a video can make it seem more brutal. Unless they're sure they can get someone really talented to do some high grade penis drawings, leaving the mosaics is probably the right choice.

Personally I'm really fond of the PS3 art. And the Chiru version for some reason was less buggy than the question arcs. It should be noted that the Fuwa torrents of the graphically overhauled Umineko games were of an older version of said graphics patch. So if you're going with those versions, you'll still want to download and install the latest version of the patches.

This is why I've been warning people about not backing if you're primarily interested in the 18+ version. For real, you only have yourself to blame for this. They never said there wouldn't be one, but they also never said there would be one. They should have let us know before the campaign was over but in the absence of any information on that version at all, I'm not sure why you'd back expecting to get a physical version.

I think it's very overrated. The drama wasn't particularly compelling, the most interesting part was one of the unlockable routes but it doesn't save the VN. The game had almost no humor, so you have to be able to tolerate a very serious and dry story centered around romantic drama and music. And one that's not all that good, either. This appears to be an unpopular opinion.

Unlicensed translations of manga, books, and even anime are illegal, too. That means all the fansubs out there are illegal to share and download. There's a difference between what is legal, and what is allowed.

A new translation from scratch by George Henry Shaft, it was actually made as a companion for his fricking novel about the game. Also, it was somehow even worse than Ixrec's already kinda bad translation.

Depending on how the original masters are created/maintained, yes, they can be a higher resolution than the 480p video offered on DVDs. Often with older video, they'll go back to the source material and remaster it. Every once in a while some company just upscales an existing 480p video to 720/1080 and it's always a worthless endeavor.