Treima

I am gonna take a pass on this one which is a shame since the art looks splendid. Gore is fine, H-Scenes are fine, but put them together and you're not really gonna get Reese's peanut butter cups.

I had to look up just what NTR was. The closest I've seen to such was I would guess that like most things, it could be interesting if well-written. I grew up watching American soap operas with my mother where that kind of stuff happens all the time, though obviously not from a first-person perspective.

Somebody already put Illyasviel from F/SN, so I can't take that one. I will just go ahead and say Yuuko from Katawa Shoujo, even if it would defeat the purpose since she has no disability. I also wish there was a route in Ever 17 where Takeshi and You could get together.

Granted, except you leave behind your body permanently in doing so. You are a ghost to anything and everything in those worlds, capable only of observing them, never interacting. Others you transport to these worlds share the same fate. I wish I had determination surpassing that of any human being that has ever lived.

Famine? I hope to avoid that sort of thing...

Welcome aboard, friend!

I have a real problem with old anime. Just can't get into them because the animation always seems so crude. That said, I think the oldest thing I watched and enjoyed was Dragon Ball.

Debatable, since there is that one part when It's only one part of a very long VN that tackles a range of topics, but it does involve memory loss, and I feel it would be a disservice to the discussion to dismiss it.

From that list, I would definitely go ahead and recommend CLANNAD. I didn't personally enjoy it as much as others did, but it's universally acclaimed for being the pinnacle of simultaneously happy and tearjerking. Go for it, I say. And I would be remiss if I didn't recommend Fate/Stay Night. If you like dark stories, I haven't read anything much darker than that VN's last route. Fair warning, nightmare fuel abounds.

Welcome to Fuwa! Read Fate/Stay Night, if you haven't already.

My first encounter with anime was this little show that aired on Cartoon Network every once and a while, you may have heard of it: And then the first manga I ever picked up was the first issue of Shonen Jump US some 11-12 years ago. I remember Naruto and Yu Yu Hakusho having chapters in that first issue.

I am currently embroiled in Ever17. One of the protagonists suffers retrograde amnesia so thorough he's totally forgotten who he is. Everyone just calls him "Kid". I highly recommend you check it out. Also, I second the above-mentioned Steins;Gate recommend.

Welcome, welcome! Hope you enjoy the community and have a long and beneficial stay!

Welcome! Since I see that your profile pic is G-Senjou's Kyousuke, I will go ahead and recommend the other Akabei Soft VN, Sharin no Kuni. And read Fate/Stay Night.

Interesting threads for me are any to which I feel I can add a new perspective or feel an urge to share a related experience.

You may be right. I think you just realized something about me that I hadn't even realized myself. It would explain my aversion to most comedy films, at least. Thank you.

Well that's my personnal opinion, but since you detailed yours, doing the same is the least I can do I understand, and I definitely respect where you're coming from. But I felt even the way the story was told could have used some refinement. It seemed to me like they had about 30 hours of good stories to tell, and overextended themselves by stretching it into a 60 hour VN. As a result, we get meaningless interactions taking up thousands of lines of text. I wanted to bash my head into the desk when the VN insisted I needed to read about every single day of Tomoya's boring electrician job in painstaking detail. That was honestly the lowest point of the whole novel for me. I get it, Key. He got a job. He works hard every day. This is established. Unless he's about to have a plot-impacting workplace accident, would you kindly move on!? Again, I appreciate you sharing your opinion. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mindset to enjoy it, coming into it having read three dark VNs with very high-stakes scenarios (Muv Luv Alternative, G-Senjou, Steins;Gate).

To elaborate, I didn't think it was "bad", and it succeeded in its prime directive. I cried. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. I just really, really disliked the character designs. Everybody in CLANNAD looks roughly half their stated age. I also just felt that the routes themselves were really hit or miss. Some were really sweet, lovely, and tightly written (Kotomi, Yukine), some were just OK or undersold an interesting heroine by saddling her with a mediocre story (Kyou, Tomoyo), and some were so mind-bogglingly dull and lacking in dramatic tension I wanted to rip my hair out (MEI, Koumura, the entire first half of After Story). I'm not going to give up on reading Key's works since they are so universally acclaimed. I'm going to try Little Busters! since the character designs in that one look a little more mature.

Very interesting video, Ashadow, and I think you're on the right track. Ultimately, visual novel readers in the west are a very, very small cross-section of an already small community of otaku or Japanophiles. I hope that this community grows large enough to justify more devs taking the risk and making the expense to officially release more and more VNs to our shores. To be honest, my own personal interest in visual novels was discovered only very recently thanks to Persona 4 Arena, a relatively mainstream fighting game with a story mode that reads just like a VN between the fights.