Zalor

That's a good point. The only times near perfect characters can be interesting is if they fall from their grace, Hell even Jesus temporarily died. Your bringing up Greek tragedy just reminded me of Aristotle, and I think he said something quite similar. How when glorious characters fall, they must also fall from a grave miscalculation (or fate). Allowing the audience to sympathize, since misfortune or poor judgement is something everyone has experienced before. Regarding comedies though, they require flawed characters to be interesting

If I wanted to read a story with a character with all the positive attributes you listed earlier I would just read the New testament Bible. You said that "It is quite sad that people now think someone like that boring", but truth be told people always found those characters boring. To use classical literature as an example, the reason people enjoyed and continue to enjoy stories like Paradise Lost (where Satan is the main protagonist) or Dante's Inferno, is because chaotic characters/settings are simply more interesting.

Looks like you got it. It's an inside joke among Type-Moon/Vn fans to deny the existence of the anime. Discussion of the anime on any Visual Novel forum or message board will always result in people denying it. Anyway, regarding the topic at hand. Is there even still evidence that Type-Moon is still developing the remake, I honestly don't see why it's taking them a snail's pace.

Seinen manga/anime with dark themes tend to be my favorite. I highly recommend Kaiji and Akagi (they were both written by the same mangaka and both have anime adaptations). Personally I recommend Kaiji over Akagi, but they are both good. For your information though, the art may look unappealing at first, but it really suits the dark atmosphere. Here is a good review of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiJXw7Js3gk. I would also recommend the heavily underrated Legendary Gambler Tetsuya. Whereas Kaiji uses the theme of gambling as a metaphor for capitalism, Legendary Gambler Tetsuya portrays what gambling was like in post-war Japan when the country was poverty stricken. (If you can't tell, I love gambling stories, ironically I stay away from gambling in real life though). Serial Experiments Lain is also quite good, but also extremely confusing and will require at least 2 viewing to understand it. Personally though, I recommend Kaiji above the others as I have watched it 3 times now and it is still as exiting as the first time I saw it.

Several people (who I would usually trust) have told me that Hatoful Boyfriend isn't that bad. But I feel like this is all a conspiracy to troll people into buying the game. Like it's a huge inside joke going around the VN community to say that this VN is good. Similar to how people say Boku no Pico is a good anime. All I can say is, nice try.

In an interview Ikuhara was asked "You've said before that you're most like Chu-Chu. If Chu-Chu is a representation of Akio (be that his youth or his grasp on Anthy) does that mean you're actually more like Akio? Could you see yourself as a villain?" His answer was: "The first part of the question: Yes. the character I'm most like in Utena is Chu-Chu. And I don't think Chu-Chu is a represenatation of Akio, but since Anthy likes Akio Chu-Chu probably wears a necktie so that he can resemble Akio. So in the last episode, when Anthy leaves Akio, Chu-Chu takes off his necktie and returns it to Akio." You can read the rest of the interview here. That said, Ikuhara is a huge troll and you can't really trust anything he says. =/

Kanon was originally released on June 4th of 1999 (check here and here), so it does technically qualify and would have my vote as the best 90's VN I have read.

I haven't done 16 hours specifically but I have done 9 - 12 hours, which in my view is still a hell of a lot of time. I think it depends what you want to do. I wouldn't want to play a game for an extended period of time on a laptop, but watching an anime or reading a VN (which is what I would be more likely to do) it is actually better I think. Since I can adjust my physical position as I enjoy the story, whereas with a game you need to maintain a certain posture (you can't afford to have your hands and arms in awkward positions). Although, I feel like we're getting into a pointless laptop vs PC debate. I think it was Narcissu specifically (which did admittedly disappoint me). He plays and enjoys JRPGS so he can handle text heavy prologues. I think I'll recommend Aselia the Eternal, so thanks for the suggestion.

Actually I disagree with a fair number of things you assert here. For one, I've only ever owned laptops and enjoy VNs on them. In fact, its very comfortable to read a VN when you're in bed. Also, I think the problem is the very misconception that VNs are for gamers. I am not much of a gamer, and I treat VNs more as books (but better due to visuals and audio). In fact, rather recently I made the mistake of recommending one of my favorite visual novels Narcissu to a friend of mine who identifies as a gamer. Apparently he got bored after the first 10 minutes. This is because gamers want to game (and I stupidly recommended a gamer a kinetic novel -.-). In addition, I don't think traditional readers would care much for VNs either, as my aforementioned gaming friend also likes reading books. When I told him that the beauty of Narcissu is how it mixes music, writing and visuals to manufacture an immersive depressing setting, he gave the classic argument "I like to imagine what I read". But I am curious since you are quite knowledgeable about gameplay VNs, what would you recommend my friend. He did admit to enjoying Phoenix Wright games btw. That's what I thought at first too, but apparently recommending Narcissu is not a fool-proof plan (just read what I wrote above). Anyway, I think I like Visual Novels being exclusively niche, so maybe it's best this way...

Thanks for your work Ezeefreak, I hope things go well for you.

This was already pretty funny, but then I started skipping around to random parts and heard chicken noises, then I was like. O.O

Very enlightening, now I can finally understand what goes on inside Astro's mind.

Just wondering. For the people complaining about Fuwa's current community, do you have any idea how toxic most VN communities were before Fuwa was around? I agree that there are problems, but generally our problem is being too accepting. And no matter how you look at it, that's way better than being a bunch of elitist pricks to one another.

I've been around Fuwanovel for quite a while myself and I have nothing significant to complain about. Yes Fuwa used to be a lot smaller, and it certainly had it's appeal as a super small community. I do have nostalgic memories of getting into interesting debates with people about VNs. Our debates were quite civil and never really derailed, but that was also because there were far fewer people to involve themselves in the discussion. Also, during those days the forums had phases of virtually being dead at times. Largely I think this is pretty much the same Fuwa it's always been just with a lot more users (and minus Aaeru, Ryoji, and Steve). That's not say that some of the stuff you complained about doesn't bother me, but as Down pointed out Fuwa always had irrelevant and stupid discussions at times. It also has really intelligent and interesting discussions other times (as it always has).

That would probably be a better use of your time. But this is a truly hilarious parody of the craziness of the VN translation community. It baffles me how all these people with a common goal have such a hard time getting along. Although, I think things have gotten a lot better since 2013 when you wrote this piece (correct me if I'm wrong).

Not don't. I love reading peoples extensive thoughts . I think rather the problem was that you didn't break up your post into paragraph sized bits. So I recommend to reorganize your posts into paragraphs, but don't make them shorter than necessary. Anyway, welcome!

I think this is probably the main reason that reading VNs have usually been an on/off experience for me. I'm not a fiction junkie (I wish I could watch anime and read VNs one after the other as others do), but when I do find myself craving an interesting story, I tend to look for an anime first before a VN (I would look for a book, but ironically I don't get much pleasure from most of them). The VNs that are good, I find tend to be really fucking good (or at least I prefer them to fiction in any other medium). But the truly stellar works are so few and far between, that it really disappoints me. Not to mention that while I'm working on changing this, I'm still confined to translated VNs... Although judging from your post, it would seem that even among the realm of Untranslated, there is a relative scarcity of great works.

This is great. Personally I'm just watching this match to see the Fan Translators fight with each other. (There need to be a sequel explaining what happened to Aaeru).

Is there a PC version? If not, is there a decent Vita emulator?