Zalor

I did a thread on the History of my experience in Fuwa and what the community was like from 2013 - 2016. I didn't hang around that much in 2016, and in 2017 I was virtually absent. But If you are interested in the early days of the forums, then check this out: Edit: This thread is a real goldmine for Fuwa history because it doesn't just feature my experiences, but other members posted their experiences as well. Particularly Sanahtlig. Other members also dug through and found old threads that they liked and shared those as well (check out zhurai's post).

I don't use discord, but I am in full support of this! Symphonic Rain is one of my all time favorite VNs!

Thanks so much man! I really appreciate the thorough response. Its great to have a coder like yourself with ambition to create a VN on Fuwa. I hope you enjoy the community and stick around!

You were raised in Detroit, damn. I've been there a few times. Actually I was born in Ann Arbor, though not really raised there. I do have some questions for you. How did you learn to make websites, programs and Mobile Apps. I've taken Intro to programming classes and have some very rudimentary knowledge of JaveScript. But I don't really know where to continue with this knowledge. And due to a personal project I am tackling, creating a website will become necessary for me. Having knowledge about producing mobile apps will also benefit this project. If you could link me to sources (either tutorials, books, blogs, etc) to help me learn this stuff I would really appreciate it! Also if you have personal advice from your experience learning these things, please share!

I swear, years ago I read these exact words on old VNDB forum posts when people were shitting on Aaeru for wanting to promote fan-translation. When did Fuwa turn into VNDB? Not that your concern isn't valid, but if people want to put effort into something, I'm not going to stop them.

You know, you are bringing up a very interesting topic that would be worth making its own thread over. But I think the discussion of whether VNs can become high art is a very good question. I say yes. There truly are few great VNs that make you question life and humanity itself. But some do exist. And the medium definitely has potential to create more of such works. Out of curiosity, why did such a shitstorm result from this? Try starting this topic of Fuwa, I think you would get a better response. Although you will of course probably get a few people trolling you about taking "porn games" too seriously. But I think other people will have quite serious and interesting responses.

I'm really glad you mentioned YMK, and thanks for sharing your experiences. Its been so long that I often under appreciate YMK because it was essentially my first serious VN, or at least my gateway into this medium. These days I think it is a bit of an under appreciated classic, but I really do think people would be better off reading it. Especially if you felt kind of lost in High School (or are currently a lost High School student). To address the part I quoted, I can tell you that it 100% the experience of bullying I witnessed in middle school was just like that. There is such a random element as to who becomes the victim, that it kind of scarred my ability to make genuine friends with people for years. It wasn't until Senior year of High School that I finally became comfortable enough with people to trust them. In 5th grade I was the new kid, and I was kind of shy. I became the victim pretty soon, and for the whole Autumn and Winter quarters I was the kid that the "leader" chose to victimize. Some kids seemed to feel sorry for me, and eventually developed a kind of friendship with me. But of course, they had to hide it. But do you know what really horrified me? When I stopped being the victim. After winter break, for god knows what reason. The leader turned on one of his henchmen. And not just a henchmen on the sidelines either, but someone who seemed like one of his good friends. All of a sudden I was accepted into the group as though nothing had happened. From 5th to 8th grade this continued. At some point in 7th grade I think the bullying got too much for that kid so he transferred, but the "leader" just found some other kids to replace the victim role. Throughout those years, for no discernible reason, my rank in the group increased. And I can tell you this, my one goal throughout that whole time, was simply not to fall back down to the victim role. I was never explicitly mean to the victims, but I did stand in the sidelines as the "leader" tormented them with people that were lower in the foodchain. I always felt kind of guilty for the passive role I played. And how I passively just accepted these promotions in that group. But I went to a really small school. If you were ostracized by that group, there wasn't another group you could join. By 8th grade though, enough of the leaders followers (including myself) all recognized that none of us liked him. And simply ran along with his antics for the same fear. So we split off and did out own thing. His group shrinked dramatically, to the point that he started befriending the people he was bullying before. To this day this is why I hate kids, because I still very vividly remember how shitty they are. And the fake masks they put in front of adults.

Speaking of backlogs, Forest has been on mine for like 2 or 3 years now. I should really get to it =/ Same with Cross Channel, except that has been on my back log for like 4 or 5 years (back when Fuwa did torrents the translation was all glitched up, so I couldn't read it. Should probably read it in Japanese now anyway).

Not that I disagree with you much, but somehow I knew when I saw that you responded to this thread it would be filled with . As for me, Suba Hibi was one of those VNs where for nearly half a year it changed my perspective and outlook on life in a really positive direction. I couldn't describe it in any sort of comprehensible way, but Minakami's philosophy of "幸福に生きよ" (Live towards Happiness) really manifested in my attitude towards life for a while. However eventually it began to fade. But for a legit half a year I listened to the full OP of Suba Hibi at least once a day. It always put me into a positive mentality.

Who are you again? I only know of lyBatman. Is this like an alt account?

Wow, it really has been a while. I still remember back in 2015 when you were practically the face of the forums. In fact, you still literally are (). Hope you're doing a lot better. Also, its weird how old members are gradually coming back to this site. Personally I started posting here again like a month ago after being gone for a year or 2 myself.

Damn, if he joined here it would be a great addition to the Fuwa community. But if he's done with the VN scene than I understand. But I just would like to thank him personally for convincing me to read certain VNs.

I really like all the backstories to each nation. If it were a game I would see the Sekai Empire as the evil expanding empire that needs to be stopped at all costs (By Aaeru's surviving crew naturally). Maybe a community project creating a VN about the western VN community is just the thing for Fuwa. But most of us are probably too lazy for that. Either way, great map!

By any chance do you know who Neutral Drow is? He is probably my favorite VN reviewer and I know he posted a lot of his stuff on the Escapist website. So if you were involved with the same community maybe you know him? I've been wondering why he hasn't uploaded any reviews in the past couple of years. I always liked his stuff.

This is honestly why I hate Reddit as a whole so much. It's so god damn authoritarian. This doesn't relate to the vn sub-reddit, but once I had a few questions about something really niche. And the only active community I could find to ask these questions was a reddit community. But the mods wouldn't allow me to post my own topic until I had a certain post count and "like" ratio. I mean, wtf!? I just wanted to ask a simple question, get an answer, and leave. That kind of authoritarian structure really bothers me and makes it a pain in the ass for new users. The regular forum style like fuwa is way better. Fuwa has good mods that do their job, and they aren't authoritarian. They pretty much never try to control the discourse that happens on the site. Fuwa users are free to talk about what we want with only a few reasonable exceptions.

Yes, in a way it appears you are

Which I feel is a real shame. If more of them actually bothered to join this community, I think it would allow them to have a better relationship with the VN community. And in turn that would benefit both them, and us (since we are a community that tries to promote VNs in the west). But instead most of these people produce relatively low-quality VNs, don't seem to have a genuine love for the medium, and above all else, are just trying to make a quick buck as VNs are gaining some momentum. Their only interest is a boost in small term sales instead of trying to build relationships that would help them in the long run if they actually tried to integrate with the VN community. /endrant

The fact that this post got you a post count

Honestly, I would vote for you to be one of the first features on Fabulous on Fuwa if I could. You are a relative new-comer that has been putting out some great content. Its great to have you on the forums!

You get a like for the cute Konata gif. Anyway, nice to have you on the forums!

I had this same exact experience when I started with unTld. Reading VNs that were around my level bored me to tears and felt like studying. Except, even with studying I had more fun. Then I found a VN way out of my level but that really interested me. And although my progress was kind of slow, it was really fun.

Back in 2015 Hmsful (or whatever his name was) and Monmon would spam your name and references to your group chat all over the forums and it really started to get on my nerves after a while. There was even this one day where they created like 5 threads that were just inside jokes from your group chat or discord or whatever. Regular shitposting can be funny, but spamming inside jokes that only people in the group chat will understand is annoying. Just keep it in the chat, you don't need to bring the rest of the community into it. Thankfully the mods conjoined them all into one thread, but it still bothered me. Honestly after that I always saw the people that associated with you as shitposting spammers. Strangely enough you didn't seem to spam much yourself, but your friends did a lot. Anyway, it seems that after all this time your group has matured a bit (I think). But I will still always remember you guys as the biggest spammers on fuwa.

Like @VirginSmasher I am also one of the more (shall we say) serious people when it comes to this medium. And I wouldn't be surprised if part of what motivated you to start this topic was because of the topic I started around a week ago. Which if you did read through that, then you would have found out that I do genuinely love this medium a lot. And it is precisely because of that love which is exactly why I hold it to high standards. Just like how parents who love their children have high standards for their kids because they want their kids to succeed in life. I similarly want to see this relatively obscure medium be treated with respect as it grows in popularity. Regardless, I don't want to make this an extension of that discussion, because you brought up some other interesting points that I would rather discuss. I think the Japanese VNs vs EVNs is stupid, but I understand why there is such a split. Even just 7 - 8 years ago, VNs were super obscure. And back then EVNs were pretty much complete trash. I think at best we had only Act 1 of Katawa Shoujo, Memo, and at most 3 other titles that were okay. But none of those even compared to the epic proportions of stories that Japanese VNs had. Fate Stay Night, G-Senjou no Maou, Swan Song, Kanon; these were decent length to long stories that had good production values. And thats just stuff that was fan-translated at the time. If you ventured deeper into the untld realm, you could find a lot of gold. And thats also not to mention good Japanese VNs that were officially licensed and released in English, such as Ever17, Crescendo, Kana Little Sister, and Yume Miru Kusuri. If you wanted a good VN around that time (which is when I started), your only option was Japanese. I think a lot of older fans still have that negative predisposition towards EVNs. We started with Japanese because thats all we really had at the time, and we have stuck to Japanese because of the large library. We haven't had a need or reason to look at EVNs. That said, with titles like Katawa Shoujo, Dysfunctional Systems, Va-11 Hall-a, etc. I actually think that EVNs have some pretty solid titles to offer now. But they still only have a really small library in comparison to the Japanese library. A big problem I think though, is that because of this historic divide. The divide has only gotten worse as VNs have started to grow in popularity. In the past at least, the Japanese VN crowd was mostly filled with fans of VNs. People who liked reading VNs. The EVN crowd however, was filled with people who just liked making them (i.e Lemmasoft). But often the people who made EVNs had read relatively few VNs if any at all. From what I have seen, it seems that they pretty much only read each others VNs. But largely ignored commercial Japanese titles. Like wise, Japanese VN fans usually didn't venture into EVNs, because the quality was much lower than what they were used to. So there was a complete disengagement with both communities. We might be seeing the repercussions of that now as these medium is growing in popularity.

Haha, I think you nailed mine. Both in being at the very far ends of Fuwa, and in my goals of treasure hunting for VNs. Also, great choice in making Tay essentially Earth. In a real way it's Tay that made Fuwanovel inhabitable.

Thanks for placing this VN on my radar! Looks very interesting. I like short VNs for not wasting so much time and getting to the point. So I will definitely give it a shot when I'm in the mood for something really dark. I don't know why, but you description of this VN is giving me some slight Saya no Uta vibes.