Decay

The thing I disliked most about Shuffle is how abrupt every scene felt. They never flowed into each other, you were just shuffled from scene to scene apropos of nothing. And they ended as abruptly as they began more often than not, never, ruining multiple good gags by never giving the reader the opportunity to actually appreciate them. It was a very weird and choppy experience. Essence+ may add a lot more scenes, but does it rewrite the existing scenes? edit: No pun intended, I swear.

Interesting side note: YumeHaven is a newly-formed sub-brand of Active Gaming Media, a pretty huge general localization house, which has handled localization for hundreds of games in the past. They're describing YumeHaven as their "first" VN brand. Implying there might be more? Maybe they'll do an eroge brand? It seems kind of unlikely to me, though, since this is a pretty well-established company who might not want to risk their reputation being tarnished by porn. Or maybe they'll be like Degica and not give a fuck. Active Gaming Media generally does legit localizations with professionally paid staff. The fact that they actually are a large localization company with full-time staff means that their projects cost more money, which is typically why these kinds of companies don't do VNs in the first place. VNs bring in fuck all revenue. It'll be interesting to see if they stick around.

If this was actually Essence+, I would have been tempted to give the game another shot. But it's not. There are two new routes in this version, and not much else new or different. Essence+, as far as I'm aware, adds a ton of new content in the common route, lots of new characters, and four more routes on top of everything else. Maybe it would actually be decent if that stuff was done well? Eh, probably not, it's still Shuffle.

lol, people really hate Shuffle here, huh? Well, I think it's pretty crap, too. But it was one of MangaGamer's top performing non-nukiges for a while, and I've seen some fans of the anime as well. It's certainly not a VN I enjoyed much at all, but even then I think some people are being a wee bit hyperbolic here. Really its main crime is that it's just really freaking boring. It's not offensively bad or anything.

No, that's not why. MangaGamer would have happily released a Steam version, they do so all the time. Navel wanting to go to Steam likely has little to do with their breakup with MG.

According to the developer, it has nudity. I'm not trying to trick anyone into anything, I'm just trying to get down to the facts here. Have you played this version? Because you're talking as if you're really familiar with it. What is it like?

"All ages" is a misnomer here. It is not suitable for all ages.

"All-ages" Apparently it's still chock full of nudity? We need to get a new label for these kinds of releases that's better than All-Ages.

>Sex works An extremely bold claim that I don't quite trust. I have to say, I was expecting something completely different when I read the thread title. Not sure I like the actual content much better. Grammarians are a joke, as always. The only language experts we need are those who teach our children how to read and write, and those who transcribe what the actual people are speaking and writing. If you're a linguist seeking to be the guiding hand of the English language, then nah, we're good. You can find a new job now. We're actually doing just fine without you.

The ML uniform thing is definitely an excuse and not a proper justification. Like yes, it's a reason that they came up with. It's just an insanely bad one.

Here's a comparison I posted when the new version first came out: I haven't had the opportunity to play all the way through the new version, unfortunately, but everything I've seen has been improved to this degree. The tl;dr is that the dialogue previously felt very stilted and didn't flow very well at all. The new version pays a lot of attention to the flow of conversation, giving a much snappier and coherent feel, and actually making the back-and-forths pretty entertaining.

1) The fan translation for 1 is pretty damn bad. Those who don't remember it being bad either don't because a) they didn't have anything to compare it to, or b) it's been ages since it was released, or most likely a combination of the two. I also didn't remember it being especially awful or anything, but when I looked at the old and new versions of the translation side by side, it was mind blowing. It was honestly a huge improvement, way bigger than I expected. 2) It's not a cliffhanger, you're good on waiting. I would strongly recommend it.

You're ignoring option 3 of selling the new game in English and set the price appropriate for the English market. They'll be two different prices for the two different markets. This already happens, just with launches that are somewhat close instead of simultaneous. Kara no Shoujo 2 is cheaper here than in Japan, for instance. Wagamama High Spec is releasing maybe within the next four months and that came out earlier this year, you can bet the prices will be different. It still makes sense for Japanese developers to probe the English market with shorter VNs, though. They probably view such a move as a risky endeavor, and making your first English product a relatively short game heavily reduces the amount of risk involved. Maybe they'll start working on translating their bigger titles if they like what they see here after their first short one.

Thing about english voice actors, is that the amateur voiceover scene in Japan is extremely robust and full people looking for their break into the massive professional seiyuu market. The amateur voiceover scene is much smaller in America, largely due to the professional scene being smaller. Our professionals are very talented, but our amateurs are... amateurish, to put it kindly. Their career expectations in the field are lower, and so their equipment is worse, their training is worse, there's a far smaller selection to find talent in, etc. For as much as I've disagree with Yorikbad on most subjects here, I'm with him in regards to voice acting. The amateur VO scene here is just too underdeveloped to expect even decent results from. And no matter how indie you are, you shouldn't actively seek to hire non-essential substandard talent to your team. With stuff like art and music? Sometimes you have to go with what you can get. Actively bringing down the quality of your game with mediocre voice performances? That's just a waste of money.

Mods please add Legend of Galactic Heroes to the top of every list in this thread to make it more accurate, thanks.

Geez, you're cynical. If anyone is only just starting to get into the game now, nearly two years after nekopara, they're probably not actually after nekopara numbers. They're not completely blind to how the market has been performing. They see the numbers for games like Corona Blossom, they should have a rough idea of what these games are actually selling like these days.

The western VN scene is larger and more vibrant than ever before right now. It's very far from dying.

In Japanese only.

And miss out on the sexy alliteration in "Fuwa Fabulous"? Please. I reported it ages ago and I thought it was you who told me that it must be a cookie issue on my end (it's not).

That's a bug I have always had with fuwa fabulous. It will never save your settings, so every time you close and relaunch your browser or visit on a different browser, you will have to select your colors again. It's an old bug that has gone at least a year without being fixed so far so it will probably never be fixed.

I believe Walkure Romanze has a decent amount of it. Not the main focus, though. Lots of pissing, as well, if you're into that.

You REALLY need to make a concerted effort to not lose track of the plot in I/O. It gets so much more complicated, dude. Like orders of magnitude more complicated. If you're losing the plot now, I shudder to think how you'll handle the rest.

When did he suggest this? I remember in the first half of last year he was suggesting that people do that, but that was before a certain potential deal with 5pb fell through at the last moment...

congratulations for typing words on the internet many times.