Decay

You should at least give the demo a shot. It's pretty long and contains a good mix of everything the VN has to offer. It's basically the common route and like half of Raziel's route.

http://reviews.fuwanovel.net/2016/04/14/tokyo-babel/ I give this one five out of five stars. How many of you have finished this one? What did you think?

Fraudulent greenlight campaigns pretty much never make it through. Valve does attempt to thoroughly vet every game that ends up getting sold on Steam. That was likely just made by some idiot who doesn't understand the system.

People forgetting to translate wasei-eigo is just a little pet peeve of mine.

Slut, not Bitch. Bitch is a wasei-eigo. But yeah, that's a strange update.

I finished this up last night and wrote my review. It should go live sometime later today, or tomorrow at the absolute latest. In short: I liked it a lot. In length: Read the review, dummy. I'm gonna miss it after spending the last two weeks with it. So long, Tokyo Babel, you were good while you lasted.

My PC is a bit below minimum spec (GTX 680, Phenom II X4 945, 8GB of RAM), and it runs at over 30FPS, at max settings, usually around 35-40. I'm on 8-month-old drivers right now, I just updated my drivers to the latest and the crash issues many others have been having started happening for me as well. I rolled back my drivers and they went away again. So maybe don't update to the latest drivers if you haven't already until they release a fix.

Practically every time you spend money, you're giving that money to billionaires. Eating out anywhere? Billionaires get paid. Buying food at a grocery store? Billionaires get paid. Going to a theater? Billionaires get paid. Riding a bus? Billionaires get paid. Taking a shower? Billionaires get paid. Want to breathe? Billionaires probably get paid somehow. Unless you live a super austere lifestyle where you don't have any luxury goods at all (and computers, mobile phones, TVs, etc are luxury goods), your justifications for piracy are nothing more than self-serving and extremely hypocritical. Either admit that you just want free shit, or actually dedicate yourself to this righteous cause of yours instead of so thoroughly half-assing it. Because right now, you're hurting the little guys WAY more than you are the big billionaires. If you're okay with that in your quest for free shit, fine, just be honest about it.

But the whole reason I propose a star system is because theoretically, people are more inclined to read the text of the review instead of relying solely on the score, thus solving that problem. I read your complaints and to be perfectly honest, all I can say is "Great!" I understand everything you're trying to say, and simply disagree on a very basic level. Games can be of slightly different quality and share the same writing, that's okay.

The word you're looking for is "primes." Routes A Prime, B Prime, etc. edit: It's heavily recommended that you read the prime routes in reverse order.

Deal with it. To be honest, that sort of immense attachment to scores is the thing a star system is supposed to prevent, and I honestly don't think it's a healthy mindset for a reviewer to have. If you want to be able to get across the subtleties of the differences between one game and another with the same rating, then you have to do so in the text of your review. You can't rely on score as a crutch. And the readers won't be able to easily tell the difference at a glance? Good! They will now have to actually read the review.

"It wouldn't require extra manpower, you just need two more people for each review" what. Look, playing VNs and reviewing isn't our full time job. It's hard enough to find ONE reviewer for a game a lot of the times. A very large percentage of our reviews are only played by one person on our staff. We cannot expect our reviewers to read even more VNs than they already do. We cannot plan for each new VN released to have at least three reviewers read it in a timely manner and then offer their opinions. We simply do not have the resources required to carry out your idea.

The reviewer should be able to dissect and critique every aspect of the game, while still relating their subjective experiences with it. It's up to the readers to determine if their personal tastes apply. If you are not part of a particular audience or niche, I am of the firm belief that you are not capable of objectively judging a game based on their standards. That you can't tell them whether or not they'd like the game. And a reviewer who tries ends up looking foolish more often than not.

I am heavily in favor of keeping review scores. I think they are a big help in allowing readers to... how do I put it? Understand and come to terms with the reviews? Even after reading the entire review, the score somehow helps the brain in conceptualizing what it all means, it puts the text they just read into an easy to understand context. However, I don't like the ten point system. Especially if there are half points. I will now argue in favor of a 5 point star scale with no half-stars, similar to the video game website that is among the most respected for their integrity, Giant Bomb. First, the problem with 10 or 100 point scales (we ultimately use a 100 point scale, although I basically have been limiting myself to 20, only going in increments of .5), is that they're too specific. Too absolute. The scores almost discourage people from reading the text because they feel like they've learned all they need to know when they see something like 8.7. It also sounds too definitive to the average user. Like when we say something is 8.7, we say that this is exactly what the game is, no more, no less, like a mandate from Heaven. It's the kind of precision that does not accept any questions or dissent. But no matter what, reviews are a very subjective thing. We should be wanting our readers to think for themselves, to ask questions, and to dissent. This is where the pros of a five point scale come into play.The point values are fuzzy and broad. They basically go as follows: "awful," "bad," "average," "good," "great." This has a large number of benefits. First, the broadness forces users to read the review to fully understand the meaning of the score. They see a 4/5 rating, go "Oh, they think it's good... but how good?" and proceed to read the rest of the review. Instead of being an absolute, final conclusion, it's an invitation to read the actual review. And once they have read the review, they then have to think about how the text relates to the rating. The more they think about us, our review, and the more they think critically about the game we're reviewing, the better. Secondly, the broadness of the scale invites our reviews to use the entire scale more liberally. For whatever reason, one thing that has been figured out after decades of different review methodology is that the more compact the scale, the more people are willing to accept reviews on the extreme ends. It's a weird psychological issue, but that's how it actually works. When someone sees a 2/5 star rating, they go "Oh, so they think it's bad? I wonder why." And when they see a 4/10, they go "Holy shit, they fucking dumped on this game, didn't they?" Especially if you use stars instead of numbers. Two stars out of five is an idea, 4/10 is a number, and people interpret numbers differently, more concretely. This also means we can give games 5/5 stars. 5/5 doesn't mean perfect, just extremely good, and you don't feel like you have to justify a 5/5 review as stringently. But our reviews may be reticent to toss out 10/10s and such, even though I would encourage everyone to use the whole scale, and that 10/10 doesn't mean absolute perfection. The more of the scale that gets used, the more meaning it has. Take the age-old criticism of IGN (although they've been better about it in recent years). They've been criticized for using a 40 point scale, 60 - 100. Anything at 60 is dogshit, anything below 60 is still dogshit. The more of the scale you use, the better. Most of my other points are variations of the other two. Readers are a little bit more able to accept dissenting opinions when they're presented as being out of five stars as opposed to numbers on a larger scale. The biggest con of a five star scale is that a lot of people don't actually want to have to think. They just want to see a score, read the final paragraph, and have the conclusions drawn for them. I don't think should we care if we lose those readers. Another con that doesn't really apply to us is how metacritic reads your ratings. Giant Bomb has talked about how they've gotten a lot of flak for publishers and have even been blacklisted by some because they give a game a 4/5 when on a 100 point scale they might have given it an 85 or 86 or whatever, and metacritic lists it as an 80. They don't seem interested in bowing down to the pressure, and this pressure wouldn't even exist for us. I just mention it here because it's almost comical how dirty the video game industry is sometimes. Overall, I think a five star scale is the best compromise between no score and the system we have now, and is the best system available to us.

Yes. I hope to finish the game and start writing the review at some point today, and for it to go live in a day or two.

No, definitely don't do this. I think you'll end up ruining both routes like this, lol. Read Raziel's route first no matter what.

It really is quite good. My biggest complaint however is that it feels like they only had about two routes worth of material but had to throw in a third route, maybe out of a sense of obligation. The route that suffered the most because of this is of course the best girl's route, Sorami's. It felt like they just sort of ran out of ideas for the fights in that route, and had many of the same encounters/villains as Raziel's but simply approached from a different angle. Also those repeat fights just felt abbreviated and substanceless. It was still good, but it wasn't blood pumping the whole time like Raziel's was. Sorami's route felt like too much of a retread for that. The final fight was rather great, though, and I liked the ending. So there's that, at least. I'm reading Lilith's route right now and it's like it has all of the inspiration that was missing from Sorami's. It's excellent so far.

Well, that could have been a lot worse.

I don't listen to it terribly often, but there's nothing inherent to it that I dislike. It's more that I just don't pay attention to the rap scene and I never know when anything good is released. I end up listening to only a few of the most popular albums released each year. That's pretty much good enough for my mainstream white ass.

I thought there were some bad parts to Lucia's route, mostly in the last third, but overall I enjoyed it a fair amount. Tonokawa's routes on the other hand (Chihaya and Shizuru), that shit was just inexcusable. To people hoping that they improve the pacing, they're certainly not going to remove scenes from the famously long common route, so...

And since you aren't in the target audience, I don't think you're qualified to make these kinds of judgements. I know jack all about Sonicomi, but I know what this general type of obsessed fan is like. Don't under-estimate them.

Do you really think they're going to "die" on this hill? And do you really think this will be an unpopular feature? This game was likely never made for you in the first place, so you commenting on the necessity of the dub seems pointless. The anime has its share of fans among a certain subset of otaku, and I'm sure a lot of them liked the dub well enough to justify this. This game is for them, after all. Like bigfatround said, lonely nerds will eat this shit up. Like I said before, this is actually going to be one of JAST's most popular titles with some pretty far-reaching appeal. I think the prospect of a dub by their favored cosplayer/voice actress will get some people pretty excited. Don't approach this from the mindset of a typical VN fan.

That's a super unlikely scenario. They wouldn't be so blatant about it, and they aren't going to announce any new titles outside of a convention, not even a nukige. And they wouldn't license THAT nukige, out of all of the ones available to them. I give that speculation less than a 1% chance of happening.

The obvious guess is that it's Gahkthun related, due to the emphasis on "shocked." They won't announce a new product randomly through twitter, and it hasn't sold well enough for a hard copy as far as I'm aware, so my guess is that they got it approved by Steam.

TLWiki only translated the Houzuki route. Later on down the line, someone on 4chan released a barely-edited Atlas machine translation or something for everything else, it's extremely bad.