Decay

Winter 2015 in a nutshell:

Well, they're all decently popular and have good ratings so it's not like I'm throwing out crap that's objectively bad or anything. Games that aren't simple romance fare tend to have protagonists with much more developed personalities, it seems like you prefer the blank slate cipher protagonist.

You want epic? Try Umineko. The two parts together are thought to comprise the single longest VN experience out there. It's freaking epic in multiple ways. It's totally linear and while romance/love is a recurring theme it's not really a romance story, but a mystery, so it differs from the other stuff you've read in that regard. You can also try Coμ and Ayakashibito for a healthy dose of chuuni. I/O is a pretty good and lengthy sci-fi/cyberpunk read. It also doesn't look like you've read Steins;Gate, this needs to be rectified immediately. It's probably right on the cusp of 30 hours. In terms of route-based romance stuff, you've read pretty much all of the good, translated, lengthy titles. ef is decent and longer than 30 hours, but is linear. It's told as a series of different romance stories with different protagonists and love interests. Majikoi could also fit the bill but it rarely gets serious and doesn't try to be suspenseful or a tearjerker like the others you mentioned. The complete translation might be finished very soon. Da Capo 2 was also decent, I thought. Although it pales in comparison to everything else mentioned in this post, it's decent route-based romance fare, and it's better than its predecessor by a decent margin, and has a crapload of content. Beyond DC2, you'll kind of be scraping the bottom of the barrel if you keep looking for 30+ hour english language romance VNs. Well, that's several hundred hours of reading for you.

This is currently the 15th best selling game on Steam in the US. I don't know what that means in terms of actual numbers but it's probably pretty good. It seems like sales picked up after the holiday sale event ended, which shouldn't be a surprise.

It also makes you a much bigger target for legal action, companies will be more aggressive with C&Ds if a group is accepting money, even if it's just donations. They don't want anyone earning money off of their work.

There is no real story, and the slice of life stuff is like 98% of the game. Each major character has an ending that isn't so much a route but an epilogue (that's what the game calls them) that lasts about half an hour or so each and is somewhat serious. But that's it. So you'll be skipping the entire game at this rate.

You got me before my edit. It just seems like a weird modding process where you may as well just play the 18+ version.

If you have to pirate the game in order to get the files to mod the steam version into the 18+ version, then why not just play the pirated version... Or why not buy the 18+ version?

So I have a question as someone who hasn't watched the show, what is this game going to be to people have already seen the anime, and what is it going to be to people who haven't? Is it an adaptation, will the stories or characters differ? Is the show going to be required viewing?

No, the data for it isn't even there.

Sounds like they didn't have a game plan going in. They'll just take the money and start bashing away at the problem, and somehow it will work out! It's like they failed at every single important step along the way. People really shouldn't try to run kickstarters for making games unless they're actually confident in their ability to manage a project with money involved. This kind of thing keeps happening because people who are competent at making games think that their talent and some seed money is all they need to create a successful game development studio.

Let's just get ambitious and say the entire Tsuyokiss series as well (same lead writer). Get to it, Dowolf! Only 500,000+ lines to go!

Yes, the backers are victims to an extent, but they were no where near as invested as the developers were. This is not a philosophy I can subscribe to. I guess I shouldn't derail things more than this, but suffice to say, if the failure was their doing then the developers won't get much sympathy from me. On November 29th, they claimed that Episode 0 would be ready by Dec 16th. No problems at all! On december 16th, the release day, oops, there's an issue and will be a slight delay! Just wait, it will be great! January 2nd: It sucks and will be canceled, sorry. It reeks. You know what's even more disappointing than an average game? Literally no game at all and seeing your money go down the drain. If Episode 0 actually is in a releasable state like they claim it is, I hope they do eventually release it.

No, not at all. Sakura is a character in DC2 and there's some carryover with the whole tree magic nonsense but they explain it all, and the stories are pretty much all stand-alone. I feel confused in those kinds of situations but I usually only feel insulted when the opposite happens and a story patronizes the reader by overly explaining simple things.

I guess I can sympathize with him somewhat but I think some people are taking that too far. The developers aren't the victims here, the backers who got nothing for their money are ("partial refunds"). I also don't buy the story surrounding episode 0. Something happened that they aren't talking about.

I didn't find Da Capo to be insulting but it sure was boring. The Nemu route was definitely confusing as well, the ending didn't make much sense. It's a rather bad VN overall. The astonishing part is how much better Da Capo 2 was. It's actually kind of ridiculous how big of an improvement it is. Even still, I would rate it overall as an average VN, I guess that shows how bad DC1 was. I've heard that DC3 was even better yet, so I'm looking forward to that whenever Mangagamer finishes it, maybe sometime next decade.

Chihaya's route is probably the weakest, so I can imagine why one might lose motivation to continue if that's what they stop on. But you should definitely continue, the rest of the game is pretty good.

So uh, does Merrett always leave at the end of the second year? Anyone know how to stop that?

(kagome route spoilers)

Kagome. The other routes just sort of skirt around most of the Comyunet issues and they only get half-assedly resolved while the Kagome route leaves almost no loose ends and addresses everything.

If you get all three required spirits for a spell and the character knows it, they WILL cast it. This will happen whether it's by coincidence (you don't touch the dice) or you force it into happening through manual dice bumping. Clicking on the spell in the spell list is just the cheaty way of doing it, which is why they take away all of your spirits when you do that. This is basically what I've been talking about. Bump the dice until the desired spirits are laying face up which is easy to do once you know the trick to cast the spells you want every time without losing any spirits. Romanesque quickly transforms from a weird and frustrating RNG-based dice rolling game into an actual skill game that takes hand-eye coordination and that kind of thing once it all starts to click in your mind. The RNG starts to matter a whole lot less once you get good at bumping the dice and figure out the good skill combos. The most random thing about it becomes the random placement of the objects, but you can still manipulate your luck by bumping the dice into ideal positions (e.g. shove one character's dice into a corner and spread out the other one's). My end game and NG+ strategy right now is (don't read if you want to figure some stuff out on your own): Oh and one other thing to note since I've seen some people ask about this elsewhere: Only the first three dice count for spell casting when doing manual bumps. Extra dice is only ever used for spirit generation and nothing else. The darker shade of dice is the original that needs to be manipulated to cast spells.

Yeah, you do have to make sure you're constantly bumping dice, the moment all the dice settle is the moment the day ends. If you click the top of a die, it bumps it without flipping it, so sometimes I'll just randomly click on a die while scanning the rest to see what needs to be flipped. Also because some other people didn't seem aware, bumping is more simple than you might think, whatever side of the die you click on is the side that lands face up. The die always spins in a predictable manner when you click on certain sides of it, so you can get used to the way it moves with enough experience. If you bump too much, you WILL start to lose spirits, but you won't lose all of them unless you go overboard. I've become a super pro at this. B)