Decay

Fate/extra is an RPG with some minor VN elements. Tsukihime and Mahoutsukai no Yoru are games set in the same universe but are about other magical related things and not the holy grail war or servants.

An addendum to my earlier Umineko post: The music is really good! And there's a LOT of it. 30 hours in and new songs are still regularly being introduced, none of them bad. I've always seen praise for the music and I now see why.

The gameplay in Kamidori average. Can't say much more than that. Trying to complete all of the quests is actually VERY grindy. I ended up using a trainer for some things. The battles can be interesting from time to time but it's still nothing special IMO. Average at best gameplay with a story that's occasionally okay but is pretty weak overall. I think Kamidori is overrated. But it also attracts a certain kind of fetish, I suppose. The game is very H heavy. And although the gameplay is only average by SRPG standards, most other gameplay VNs are even weaker so I guess Kamidori stands out there.

I'm about to start on episode 3 of Umineko. You know, this VN is fucked up. Really fucked up. I kinda forgot how dark Higurashi was. I only played the first chapter of that but I still should have known. Umineko is a different kind of dark, though, because the atmosphere is one where everything is kind of ridiculously over the top, with literal cackling evil villains and fourth wall breaking debate scenes. But even still, the depth of the brutality and violence can be pretty shocking. If they actually had event CGs for the violent images being described, Kara no Shoujo would look like a fluffy moege by comparison. None of this is a bad thing. I'm glad there are no event CGs for those scenes. Either they would dampen the effect of your imagination constructing the scenes from the narrative, or they would just be way too much. As it is, the written text perfectly provides the desired impact while letting your imagination go wild. You know, like books. 07th's games are written much more like novels than most VNs because they can't fall back on the art, and I can appreciate that. That the PS3 version added actual good art almost seems unnecessary, and I now understand how someone could enjoy this without it, but even still I appreciate the updated visuals as a good compliment to the experience. Overall, I'm still really excited to continue reading. The VN goes deeper into the witch stuff than I expected at first and I thought that would turn me off but now that more characters are being introduced, I'm interested to see where they go from here. I feel like I've been marathoning this for days and have barely made any progress. That's both a good feeling and a little intimidating, but I'm not going to back down now.

Thousand Arms had a US release about fifteen years ago. It wasn't a VN but an RPG/Dating Sim hybrid. I remember playing it when it came out and not liking it.

He seemed to use 50 million yen as the basic example for a game's cost. I know jack shit about VN production, but knowing about other game types, that seems about right for a decently produced mid-sized VN. That's around $500,000 USD. Keep in mind that common non-blockbuster console titles, like say the new Wolfenstein game that came out this year, probably cost around $40 or $50 million USD. Something like Destiny costs well above $100 million, even before marketing. Final Fantasy games are probably above $50 million. Whereas I can imagine something like Sekai de Ichiban Dame na Koi costing less than a million dollars and Light's games costing at least several million to produce. Their games sell very well, are highly regarded, and have very high production values and unusual art styles. That's just my guess. No matter what, you will never see the a VN produced with the amount of staff and money that a traditional game is made with, simply because even in Japan they are niche products that don't earn loads of money. But thankfully they're also comparatively very inexpensive to produce due to their nature. As for development times, you can kind of get an idea just by looking at a company's release list on VNDB. Seems like 6 months for smaller games and 9 months to a year for bigger ones are not uncommon, and the really major ones having even longer production cycles. You have to keep in mind some factors like multiple dev teams and overlapping schedules but what I said seems about right.

an ign.com review of hatoful boyfriend, and it's 8/10. What a world we live in.

My first VN was Phoenix Wright... if you can call it one. Eh, it probably doesn't count. So in that case, my first "real" VN was probably Fate/Stay Night several years ago. Then after that, I read almost nothing for a long while. I wasn't against the idea of visual novels or anything, but I just wasn't familiar enough with them and sort of scoffed at the idea of reading romance oriented stories, which most VNs are. Well, a disproportionate amount of translated ones aren't, especially several years ago, but I didn't really know that at the time. Eventually on a total lark I decided to watch a romance shoujo anime, Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun, which I actually kind of enjoyed a little and led me to periodically watching other romance shows or shows with romantic elements, such as going back to watch Eden of the East. Then some time last year I watched Clannad because I saw a lot of recommendations for it and enjoyed it a whole lot. I learned it was an adaptation of a VN and got back into the format, I became totally absorbed by almost all genres of visual novels, enjoying stuff I couldn't possibly imagine enjoying a few years ago. I don't remember what the first VN I read in this resurgence was, maybe G-Senjou no Maou? Thinking about it, it could have possibly served as a gateway drug for romance themed VNs when I was still thinking of only reading story games, as it bridges that gap somewhat well.

There are what, like two or three regular common route choices before the branch points? One of them has an affect, and answering wrong can lock yourself out of Sachi's route. It's not really a spoiler so I'll just say straight up, but when offered with a choice where you have to pick from several of the girls to side with, side with Sachi. It's kinda bullshit because it's the one choice that matters and it's a completely innocuous one that appears to be totally inconsequential on the surface.

There was a failed translation attempt several years ago. That project is super dead, but maybe you can get into contact with the hacker and have him share his tools or even directly assist you. He has a contact form on his website here: http://ebilpie.weebly.com/contact.html The site has been abandoned but maybe that will still get through to him.

It's not usually too hard to figure out a line count. Easiest way is to just load the script files into text editors that will give you information like line count. But those script files often have stuff other than the game's text, so you have to single that out first. Anyways, not every VN translation is ran through TLWiki. Go to the project page for the translation you're interested in, and maybe they have a route breakdown (but they don't always do).

So I willfully admit I've had some pretty large blind spots for my VN selections and I've been trying to pick games I've been avoiding for various reasons until now. One of these is Umineko. I just finished chapter 1 of the first game and man, I am so into this. I regret not picking it up until now. The fact that all of that was just a tiny portion of the overall experience actually has me really excited. It's been a while since I was this excited over the prospect of reading a VN. Really, not since I just started reading them and was cherry picking the absolute best available. One of the first VNs I've ever tried was Higurashi and for various reasons I was kind of cold on it, but Umineko seems way more up my alley. Now I'm thinking I'll definitely have to read the rest of Higurashi once the updated version from MangaGamer with a new translation and new art is done.

The proper translation will not be done for a long time, if ever. There is one translator on the project and he's also translating another game at the same time, which seems to have a higher priority, and progress on that is slow as well. So the translation probably won't even be finished next year, unless someone else starts translating it. The machine translation isn't even worth considering, it has been slightly edited to be at least somewhat readable, but it's still incredibly bad. One of those cases where something is not actually better than nothing, as it ruins all of the humor. In the future, if you're interested in a specific game, you can just search VNDB. It is highly comprehensive and will often give you summaries of the games, screenshots, and will tell if you there are any translations for it. You can be assured that if a translation is not listed there, then it either doesn't exist or has been inactive for so long that there's no hope for it.

That is pretty crazy. Did you skip all of the social link stuff and skip most of the text? I only rarely died or got stuck and it took me around 90 hours to beat Persona 3 FES, and around 80 to beat Persona 4 on my first attempts. From everyone else I've talked to, these are about on line with what's usual for those games. They aren't ball bustingly hard or anything, but they're long as hell, 3 especially.

(F/SN spoilers)

I don't remember the contract aspect of things being played up, but Rin's explanation was literally "Magus' sperm contains magical energy that familiars can absorb." She also made it sound like female magi cannot do the same thing but I may be misremembering that. There are definitely other ways to transfer magical energy, as well.

Magical magus sperm is one of the dumbest plot devices I've ever seen in a non-nukige visual novel.

One of my biggest complaints about Dangan Ronpa 1 is that the protagonist, who is supposed to be the one solving the mysteries and all that, was actually just kind of an idiot who had everything solved for him by others. Either everyone else had to heavily hint at the solutions before he got them, or they just straight up solved the mysteries for him. Does the sequel improve on that aspect?

Akane's route is fine. I liked it better than Shizuru's and Chihaya's. It's... very different, that's for sure.

It doesn't really matter when Asuho's route is done, but yeah it feels like Komomo's and Kosame's routes are meant to be done back to back, and so are Isuzu's and Chinami's.

There's a proper translation in progress for Flyable Heart but the progress is really slow, unfortunately. Hopefully some day we'll get them in proper english.

Even "magi-tech" is "true fantasy". The genre of fantasy goes well beyond Tolkien inspired stuff. It not being medieval themed certainly seems to be the case, though.