Zalor

Just to be clear, I wasn't saying that it is inevitable that interest in anime/games, etc will decline as you grow, just that it is very likely that it will.

Yeah, I've done some memory editing before. As you mentioned, changing stats and such is fairly easy since you can find specific values pretty easy. But other stuff, yeah that isn't as simple. For gba memory editing at least, I used to have lots of tutorials saved back when I was trying to learn this stuff. You may have to go into the graphics and figure out how big the tiles are, and how many tiles are in each screen. With that information, figuring out the X,Y coordinates shouldn't be too hard. Hell, I think certain emulators will have a debugger that will give you a bitmap of the background and if you click on an area it will give you the X,Y coordinates of that place. The best thing you can do as a beginning rom-hacker is too look at codes written by other people. This is probably the best way to learn how things are done. So if you want to learn how to do a wall-hack in this game, look at how wall-hacks are done in other games. With that information you should be able to figure out the process of how a wall hack is done. Hopefully. Then you can try writing that code for yourself for the Saint Seiya game.

In regards to the saving issue. It is an issue with the cartridges battery. After a certain amount of playtime, the battery will no longer be able to save. I know this is a huge issue with the pokemon games. So when I was a kid, one of my cartridges stopped saving. I then begged my parents to buy me another copy. But eventually, that other copy also stopped saving xD! By wall hacks, do you mean walking through walls? I am not sure how much I can help with with hacking the gameboy Saint Seiya game for 2 reasons. 1) Most of my hacking knowledge is focused on hacking Fire Emblem exclusively. Most of the work I do, is simply using the tools that the real hackers made. For the sake of making hacking and level creation more efficient, any game that has a hacking community around it usually has people who make programs to make the process easier. This is because true hacking requires poking around the games assembly code. And few people have the knowledge/understanding of such a low level language to actually be able to make use of that information. So often the people who do understand that complicated stuff, make tools for us commoners. 2) While I have attempted several times to learn Assembly for the Gameboy Advance (with only very moderate success), the original Gameboy uses a different processor than the GBA. If I were an active as well as a good hacker, it theoretically wouldn't be too hard to learn another assembly language after learning 1. But honestly, at best I only made small steps towards learning assembly for the gba. And ultimately I decided that hacking at that deep of a level wasn't really for me.

I study Japanese, attend a Japanese University, and occasionally like watching anime and reading VNs. Well that is me currently. Just a couple of years ago anime and VNs were a far bigger part of my life. But regardless, even though my interest in otaku-media has fallen, I think many would still label me a weeaboo. What I find very interesting and also admirable about you Clephas, is the fact that you still maintain such a passion for this stuff. And I always find it astonishing when people claim (and in your case I know it is true) that they learned Japanese through anime and VNs. While I have found VNs good practice for Japanese, honestly I found it not very good for learning (practice and learning I think are two different things). Personally I found talking to Japanese people and being immersed in the language to be the only effective way to learn the language (in addition to taking classes). VNs are more a secondary means for improving my Japanese (mostly just reading and kanji at that). In Japan I have noticed, that most foreigners who can speak the language at a reasonable ability share one thing in common. We like Japanese women. I say "We", because I have noticed that my motivation to learn Japanese transitioned at a certain point. While I started learning for VNs/anime, what motivates me now are Japanese women. I feel like this is an unpopular view to express in an otaku community (partly because of the whole stigma against 3D). But honestly, In real life at least, most foreigners I met who were reasonably fluent in Japanese were either married to a Japanese woman, or they were a womanizer of Japanese girls. Anyway, I bring this up because I think while many weeaboos end up dropping this phase and moving on with their lives. I think of the weeboos that actually bothered learning Japanese, when their weeboo phase starts ending I think it is very common for them to transfer that interest to Japanese girls.

Wow, Rom hacking yeah! I am quite familiar with the hobby. Ever since I was 12 I would periodically go through phases where I would work on a rom hack, only to drop it after a month or two. My most recent example would be a couple of months ago. This past April, May and part of June I was working on a rom hack, I had 3 levels designed a custom script and characters, but once my summer job started I got too busy and once again dropped the project. Personally, all my experience is with the Fire Emblem hacking scene. I really really loved the GBA Fire Emblem games as a kid. To the extent that I played two cartridges of Fire Emblem 7 to the point where the games would no longer save for me. So in my very early adolescence when I got my first computer, I discovered the Fire Emblem hacking scene where fans were making their own custom levels, characters, and stories. As a kid I imagined lots of my own Fire Emblem-esque stories, so I naturally picked this hobby up. If you have the ambition of making your own custom game through a rom-hack, it is very hard work and you are doomed to give up if you do it solo. Anyway, my most recent rom-hacking triumph was inserting a song from another game into a Fire Emblem 7 rom. This sounds simple, but music insertion is actually a more complicated process than it should be. Specifically I inserted Katrina's theme from Romancing Saga 3 into Fire Emblem 7. This was supposed to be the map music of Chapter 3 of my hack, but I never got around to finishing Chapter 3:

Tomorrow will be July 20th, the exact date that Mamiya Takuji from Suba Hibi predicted the world would end in 2012. Tomorrow marks the 5th year anniversary. This actually came to mind today, because my girlfriend today asked me that trick question of "do you know what tomorrow is". And I said the 1 month anniversary of when we started dating. And then she was surprised that I as a guy actually remembered. Little does she know that I only remembered because I associated our anniversary with this date, lol. So now I am curious if anyone else ever remembered an important date or time because it shared the same time as an important event in a VN, anime, movie or some other kind of story?

Looks interesting! Will probably pick it up and give it a try sometime when I have time

I would just like to thank everyone who has in the past, and who currently works with Fuwareviews. For something that is purely done out of the love of this hobby, it looks like a lot of hard work. The kind of hard work that some people even get paid to do, and yet you guys all do it for free. I really do respect and admire that. I've always felt bad myself for never applying for a position as a reviewer. But I know myself well enough to know that it is work I can not do. I have very particular taste and standards for stories, and if those standards are not met I simply just drop what I am reading. If I love a story, I can write tons about it and analyze its minute details. But if I hold no passion for a story, finishing it, no less writing about it is something I can't see myself being able to do. And as a reviewer, you have to read and write about whatever is given to you, whether you like it or not. This is work I can not do, and so I really do respect the people who can.

Lol, goddamn the sex scenes in Suba Hibi. But I'm very happy to finally hear some news about the progress of this localization. I honestly was starting to think it would be a year or 2 before we would hear anything again. Personally though, I don't really like how they advertise the VN in the Kickstarter rough draft. But honestly, advertising and trying to explain Suba Hibi without going into spoilers is a really hard task.

I've been a pretty hardcore Fire Emblem fan for a while now. Hell, the first internet forum I joined back in 2010 was a Fire Emblem Forum. I also occasionally ROM hack fire emblem games as a hobby. In fact, I even once made a Fire Emblem hack that was a parody of the Fuwanovel community back in 2015 (Part 1, Part 2). In addition to that, my avatar is a touched up mug of one of my favorite characters from my favorite Fire Emblem game, FE 4. Q1: I've played through FE4, FE6, FE7, FE8 fully. I got half way through Fire Emblem 3 book 1 (which is just a remake of FE 1). And I played a bit of the original FE2 a couple of years ago, but didn't really like it much. Oh, I also played through some of Fates. But I didn't like it that much. In fact, I just am not much of a fan of the newer Fire Emblem games. These days, if I am looking for a new Fire Emblem experience, I usually play fan-made rom hacks instead. Q2: My favorite character is probably... Damn that's a hard question. In FE4 I would say Eltshan (my avatar). He was a truly loyal knight, even to the bitter end. In FE6, I would say Narshen, he is a really fun villain. In FE7, Legault. In FE8, Rennac. Q3: Fire Emblem the Sacred Stones was my first. I think it was 12 years ago the first time I played it. Q4: I actually hate how FE has become Waifu Emblem recently. Q5: Classic Hard. Q6: N/A Q7: Fire Emblem Genealogy of the Holy War (aka FE4) is my favorite. Q8: I love how well you get to know the characters through their interactions. Especially in supports. You grow an attachment to them, which just makes you care more if they die. Q9: God, this was over a decade ago. All I can tell you, is that in my first run of FE 8 I let a lot of characters die, lol. And I remember I forgot to recruit Joshua and just killed him with Seth. Q10: I don't really like the new direction it has been going. The stories don't seem as good as they used to be, villains (especially the ones in Fates) are too 1-dimensional, and I don't like the whole Waifu Emblem thing. Q11: Honestly, I don't pay much attention to what's happening to Fire Emblem anymore (on the official end). I like playing unofficial ROM hacks time to time though. Q12: As mentioned above, Yggdra Union is a really fun game. Yeah, I can't really deny that I am one of those cliched long time Fire Emblem Veterans who has turned Elitist and dislikes the newer games. But hey, when you fell so in love with the older games, its just really hard to adjust your tastes. I have no problem with people who like the newer games. It is just that for me personally they are not my thing.

@qberty Sorry, I believe my grudge for Steam blinded me a bit, and I overlooked some important things in your opening post. Furthermore, and this is no excuse just an explanation, I wasn't exactly sober when I made that post. I appreciate the work you are doing to make an intuitive and fully user friendly Visual Novel development engine. I initially did not realize that this was your own project, and I thought this was a project that Steam was working on and that you were merely advertising it here on their behalf. But now that I understand that this is your own hardwork, I would like to apologize for my initial rudeness and misunderstanding. Knowing that this engine is being developed by a visual novel fan who obviously has passion in this medium is something that I can have faith in. I made the initial misunderstanding of thinking that this was something Steam as a corporation was developing. I apologize for my drunken misunderstanding. I always appreciate and support projects done by true fans of this medium. But I hate it when corporations take something that people are passionate about, and just try to just profit off of it (which is what I initially thought was happening). Thanks for what you are doing. And I hope that you can forgive me for my idiotic first post.

Maybe I am not excited about this because I am sick and tired of Steam trying to take over the market for VNs in the west. In fact I am probably one of the few people who genuinely doesn't like and refuses to use Steam. But Renpy is already a free Visual Novel engine that hardly requires any programming knowledge. What is the point of this? Other than Steam trying to find a way to eventually capitalize off of this down the line. Renpy already has accomplished almost everything that this engine advertises.

I commented ages ago on this thread. Today I got so excited when I got an email notification that this thread was updated. I thought you updated the story, lol. Guess not. But just know that I am a fan of this work too!

Snow: Is the easiest VN I have ever seen. I mean, the writing is just a complete joke. So its really easy, but in my opinion also really boring. But some people seem to like it.

Same as me pretty much. It's a damn shame Suba Hibi lost

Me too!

Congratulations! I would have linked to the Evangelion ending but Asonn beat me to it.

Oh Shit yeah! My bad, yeah now I have a vague memory of voting for it against Clannad, lol. How did I forget that? Although that said, given the popularity of Clannad I would be surprised if Swan Song makes it to round 3. But a man can dream.

Cool, just submitted mine. Damn, it seems Swan Song lost last round huh. That's a damn shame. I'll still be rooting for Narcissu, Suba Hibi, and Symphonic Rain though.

Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme is honestly the worst Visual Novel I have ever witnessed. Me and my roommate once read through it drunk as a joke. The only reason that the VN has decent ratings on Steam is because it panders to very weird/rare fetishes. And the people with said fetishes are so desperate for anything that panders to them that they have almost no standards. But really, if you check it out for yourself, you can see how atrocious the writing, art, and music all are. Here is the VNDB page: https://vndb.org/v12136

It's not that hard *cough*Symphonic Rain*cough*

That's why I like the VN community more than the anime one (even though I watch a fair bit of anime). Because anime is so big now, there are so many divides in the community. Whereas with VNs, even with people that have very different tastes from me, we can both at least relate in being fans of this obscure medium.

Is the VN industry actually doing that badly (economically)? I mean, I noticed that the quality of releases has been going down. But that isn't proof of anything economic. Could anybody link me to some sources that document the decline of the VN market in Japan? Also, what are the reasons for the VN market going down?

Wow, just seeing that makes me want to play Everlasting Summer. Also, your point about Liminal spaces was very interesting. In fact, that's one more aspect that makes VNs such an immersive medium.