sanahtlig

MoeNovel basically said they're part of Will. So they do work closely with the developers. I think extrapolating that they "created new scenes" is stretching what they actually said a bit far.

I think that depends on your point of view as well. There's people who find this concerning. For those who take a stance against censorship, support of it is the last thing they want to see. If censorship is seen as more profitable than no censorship, Mangagamer and JAST may find themselves outcompeted down the road. The developers with promising titles won't bother with an uncensored release if a censored release (e.g., through MoeNovel) will guarantee more sales.

"If my Heart had Wings" releases tomorrow. MoeNovel's Facebook page has over 16,000 likes. A French blog interviewed MoeNovel's producer: http://projetsaya.fr/?page_id=308 Of note:

Sengoku Rance is arguably the best gameplay VN currently available in English, rivaled only by Kamidori Alchemy Meister and possibly Eien no Aselia (if you don't mind missing out on the adult content). Duel Savior is also pretty good, but I didn't find the gameplay all that engaging.

As amazing as it may seem, VNs were around before the infrastructure existed to pirate them. In some cases, they were even selling them in English! http://vndb.org/v721

Really!

Softhouse-Seal titles should fit your needs.

You seem to play a number of gameplay VNs but give them all low scores!

That's completely and utterly false. Where are all the nukige that comprise at least half of localized VNs? One of the most disappointing titles for me was Koihime Musou. That was supposed to be one of Mangagamer's better releases, and it's their bestseller, but the story itself is awful and cliched.

My one "10" to date is Ikusa Megami Zero. It succeeds at being both a solid RPG and a riveting VN.

Looking through your profile, I notice the glaring absence of bad games. Adding bad games to your repertoire provides the perspective necessary to appreciate the better ones. I suggest playing a Softhouse-Seal title: http://vndb.org/v4857

I know a little Japanese myself. I play Japanese titles using a combination of machine translation and word-by-word lookup assisted by text hooking.

I see that the vast majority of the titles you've played are in English, yet a few aren't. How did you play those? Machine translation?

The latter two are untranslated.

Now that we have a handy link for VNDB profiles (thanks Tay!), it's time for a long overdue discussion of people's VN collections. It's pretty fascinating just to click through the various profiles of people you know and see what they've been playing. Myself, I've played quite a number of VNs, many of them in Japanese and often with gameplay elements, and this is pretty clear from my profile. Because of my focus on gameplay titles heedless of the language barrier, I've actually missed out on a number of popular fan-translated titles that many people here have probably played.

I would recommend lining them up on a horizontal line. VNDB, and then whatever anime database. To prevent crowding, you might consider limiting the display to X number of the various anime databases? I guess it depends how many options there ends up being. Does anyone even need to display more than one at once?

The current hyperlink under the avatar looks great and leaves horizontal room for later additions. Nice job Tay! Now I'm going to have to build a profile on MyAnimeList and fill in the hundreds of anime I've seen. Oh dear.

Also, knowing your interests, I recommend Saya no Uta. It'll become your new favorite VN. I guarantee it.

If you could force it to recognize the input as a url (similar to the website field), that would increase the feature's usefulness. Edit: Nice, it appears under the avatar too! You could reduce the vertical space it takes up under the avatar by abbreviating the link to a simple hyperlinked "VNDB profile". Of course that relies on users being honest and not trying to phish people into clicking a link that goes somewhere else. That could be avoided by forcing the user to input their user number, then filling that into the url.

Right, listed under "My Information" would probably be the best place. If there's a specific field for it (like there currently is for Instant Messaging accounts), people will be more likely to link to their VNDB profile.

Voting on those titles in your VNDB profile (as I suggested before) would provide useful information. I did it for 128 titles, you can do it for 13.

I think this would be useful and would allow people to compare VN collections more easily.

A VNDB profile link in your Fuwanovel profile would be useful for conveying your interests. Actually, I'd recommend it as a general profile field on Fuwanovel.

If you liked Shuffle, you might like Koihime Musou or Soul Link. I didn't like Koihime Musou, but in general Shuffle fans seem to like it.

This topic has glossed over many of the advantages of an ISO / original installer combo with a fan translation patch. 1) Distributing the translation patch and installer separately allows the fan translation to be easily updated. 2) A preinstalled game short-circuits patch installation and fails to credit the translators, whose currency is ego and recognition. This leads to stife within the community and discourages translation efforts. 3) A preinstalled game discourages users from purchasing the originals. Again, this ruffles feathers and discourages translation efforts. 4) Making unlicensed distribution difficult is not necessarily a disadvantage, depending on your perspective.