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Posted
8 hours ago, Stormwolf said:

A true a shame. I love guardianf of the galaxy and scigi in general, but japanese all girl cast??? *barf* just cutesy cuties being cutesy cute *barf*

I liked that they didn't focus on the romance part, but yeah, I would like some guys as well lol I really liked Little Busters for that reason (Masato best boi) and I have a feeling I'll also enjoy Majikoi when I finally read it c: at least they didn't show much fanservice on this one! (I think...?)

Posted

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So, I finally decided to clean up my VN library and read all those VNs that I got on sales or in bundles ages ago and never played. As a result, I finally got to Alice in Dissonance titles. fault milestone one was one of the first VNs I bought on Steam, back in 2016, and while I liked the first 20 minutes of the game that I saw during my play test back then, but for some reason I never finished the game till now.

Overall, the fault series was pretty different from what I expected judging by these first twenty minutes. If I had to describe this series in a few words, I'd say, it's an episodic fantasy with heavy focus on characters and drama. What I personally found rather impressive about these games is how well they use CGs and visual effects in certain scenes to make them look really dynamic. In my opinion, it's really impressive that a doujin VN manages to use its graphics a lot more consistently and more creatively than many high-profile titles. The quality of the art itself, however, is a bit inconsistent. Overall it's pretty standard anime-style drawings, and there are some minor characters who look a bit strange, but, overall, it's pretty detailed, and there are some pictures that look really beautiful. Also, the first game got a major graphics update in 2018, so now it's one of the few VNs in 4K resolution.

However, if we exclude the graphics, there are some minor flaws that I would expect from a doujin game. First of all, there are no voices. I personally don't consider it a major flaw and believe that some VNs actually work better without voices, but it may be crucial for some people. Secondly, while I personally didn't dislike the music, its usage in the game wasn't ideal. Some songs were looping with very small interval and it was very irritating. Also, there are some melodies that may sound well on their own, but, I believe, don't fit well in a visual novel because they distract from reading. Finally, it's not very important, but the opening song is kind of... meh, if you ask me.

As for the story, the first half of milestone one is mostly focused on introducing the setting and important characters. Which leads me to the biggest complaint I have with this game - the first half is basically just one massive infodump. I mean, I understand that it's necessary evil because of the episodic nature of the series, and they tried to include the infodumps more naturally in the dialogues, but I still can't help but think it could be done even more subtly. There were some occasional small details in the story that, I felt, either didn't make much sense or could be done a bit better. Other than that, I don't really have any complaints about the story at all. As it shifted from the worldbuilding more toward character drama in the second half of the game, it got a lot more interesting. The last quarter is especially cool. All the little details actually come together in the final reveal, and overall the conclusion felt pretty emotional to me, just like it was supposed to feel. Overall, I'd give this game a solid 7/10.

 

fault milestone two (side: above) is pretty similar to the first game that there's little to add. Still, many small details were definitely improved. There's no problems with the music. Actually, I can say that I liked the soundtrack in this VN. In my opinion, the general quality of writing also improved. There are no infodumps, and all the new information is introduced naturally in the story. The visual effects are used even better than in the first VN, especially since there's a bit more action (though it's still not the focus). The overall pacing of the story is also pretty great. Though, I suspect it may be a problem on my side, but I personally had some annoying stability issues in the second half of the VN. It really didn't help the emotional impact of the final scene that I had to replay the whole scene four or five times simply because it was constantly crashing. Still, I don't think I've seen anyone complain about having any similar problems with this VN, so most likely I just finally need to buy a proper desktop PC instead of my three-year-old laptop.

The only major complaint I have with the game is that, well, it's incomplete. As you can probably guess from the title, this game is something like a half of the second episode in the story rather than a proper episode. Excluding the overarching story that started in fms1 and will probably continue before the last episode assuming that we actually get to the last episode eventually, there are two major plot threads that started in this episode, and while one of these threads comes to the proper emotional conclusion, the other is completely left hanging. Well, it's a pretty obvious thing to expect from an episodic release. Still, I can't really give it anything higher than 7.5/10 for now. I will probably raise it after side: below is released. Though, it seems like they are going to release the prequel to the first game first, and, after massive delays, it will probably come out this year, so I'm not really expecting the continuation for another two or three years.

Just for the record, the trailer to fstp looks pretty amazing!

 

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Mhakna Gramura and Fairy Bell is quite an interesting... experience. It's written more like a children's story book, though there is a bit of a twist in the last quarter of the VN. It's also fairly short: it took me just two hours to finish the whole VN. Overall, you can definitely read it even if you didn't read the main fault series since it's pretty standalone. Well, it's interesting example that VN format works even for something so vastly different from the usual galge and otomege. I gave it 8/10 on VNDB, but, honestly, due to the nature of this VN, I don't think like rating it even makes much sense.

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the later fault titles. I can't really say this was the most impressive VN series I've read at this point, but it has good potential, and I still enjoyed it a lot.

~~~~

Now, let's see what Kindred Spirits of the Roof is about.

PS. Also, I stalled Baldr Sky for now. I don't know, I just can't make myself enjoy this VN for some reason. I'll return to it eventually and at least force myself to finish the first route, but I don't know when it will happen.

Posted

Finished Baldr Sky yesterday, and sadly, it didn't live up to my expectations.
The final/true route managed to fall completely flat and made me uninterested to the point where I didn't really care about what happened to any of the characters. Quite an impressive feat, considering how much I enjoyed the other routes. (Well, I guess it's not that uncommon for Japanese works to start off interesting and then fail to deliver in the end due to going way over the top, adding too much nonsense and whatnot.)
I also have to say that this is one of the worst gaming experiences of my life. Every moment the story wasn't progressing was more or less just a pain in the ass. I didn't enjoy the combat one bit, and it didn't exactly help that the text skip function was more or less useless, so I was forced to wade through repeating content for hours on end as I progressed through the different routes. I probably had to spend at least 20-30 hours on manually going through stuff I'd already read, just because it wasn't properly flagged as such in subsequent routes. Not exactly my idea of fun.

Anyway, I'm done with that now and have started playing Evenicle. Does the story get interesting later on? I've only finished chapter 1, but so far it's just been some shallow plot mixed with rape and the protagonist going around calling girls cute every 10 seconds. (Perverted protagonists really aren't my cup of tea, and it's one of the main reasons I'm skeptical about delving into the Rance series.)
It's kinda annoying that there's no gamepad support, and I don't understand why there has to be unit bars covering 30% of the screen at all times. (It would have made sense if there were real-time battles or as a way to mask a 4:3 resolution while converting the game to 16:9, but that isn't the case.)

/end of whining

Posted
11 minutes ago, Seraphim88 said:

Anyway, I'm done with that now and have started playing Evenicle. Does the story get interesting later on? I've only finished chapter 1, but so far it's just been some shallow plot mixed with rape and the protagonist going around calling girls cute every 10 seconds. (Perverted protagonists really aren't my cup of tea, and it's one of the main reasons I'm skeptical about delving into the Rance series.)

There's, uh, stuff going on in the background, sure, and some stuff might be mildly interesting as far as plot is concerned but, uh, why would anyone play Evenicle if they're not in it for the harem of wives?

Posted
3 minutes ago, Mr Poltroon said:

why would anyone play Evenicle if they're not in it for the harem of wives?

I honestly knew very little about it. I've just seen a bunch of people recommend it, and since it has a decent rating on VNDb, I figured it would be worth a go. I'll keep playing for now since it, despite my complaints, is rather fun, but I hope the protagonist's vocabulary evolves somewhat over the course of the game. The "cute" barrage coming from his mouth could lead to some serious cases of alcohol poisoning if used as the basis of a drinking game.

Posted
1 hour ago, Seraphim88 said:

The "cute" barrage coming from his mouth could lead to some serious cases of alcohol poisoning if used as the basis of a drinking game.

But if you used water instead of alcohol, would you drink enough to suffer from water intoxication?

Posted (edited)

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Out of curiosity I've also tried two of those new western render VN's, and for the most part I was positively surprised. Apparently Acting Lessons and Depraved Awakening are the ones that stand out the most at the moment and so I picked those. The former goes more into slice of life and drama territory, while the latter is pretty much a nukige.

Depraved Awakening:
Overall, I found the quality of the two titles comparable, although Depraved Awakening impressed me a bit more with its erotic thriller approach. H-heavy titles with a solid plot are pretty rare and Depraved Awakening certainly tried to give you an interesting story to keep you engaged. You're playing a detective trying to solve a murder case in a film noir setting. There aren't a lot of Japanese VN's like that. The Innocent Grey titles have a similar setting but are way more serious and plot focused with less H-content. Except Cartagra maybe which was also quite H-heavy. The closest thing are probably the mystery titles of Astronauts: Sirius which have a strong western touch and a lot of H-content. Writing was a bit crude for my taste, but I liked the atmosphere and the fast pacing. It also had a decent soundtrack, but almost no sound effects and no voices.

Acting Lessons:
I think the writing of Acting Lessons was a bit better (except for the H-scenes) but I had the impression that it struggled a bit with what it wanted to be. Some plot developments towards the end were a bit... odd to put it mildly. It was also bit 'slow on the uptake' so to speak. I mean, if the VN asks me twenty times if I prefer Melissa over Megan and I'm answering "HELL, YES!!!" and the conclusion of the VN is 'Deeply in love with Megan, but plays around with Melissa', then I really don't know what to say anymore. I think the plot arc with your buddy was the most consistent one, even if I found some of his escapades a bit too over the top lol. The actual acting lessons and 'Improv' in particular was a bit boring for my taste, but I liked when they were just hanging out with each other. H-scenes were poorly written with almost no text in them which is a serious issue considering it had quite a lot of them. Soundtrack could have been better and just like Depraved Awakening, it had spare sound effects and no voices. Overall, I think if you want slice of life and drama and don't care too much about the style, then you probably find a lot more and better stuff amongst Japanese VN's.

3D versus 2D:
Nevertheless, there are a few things that stand out in both VN's and I guess in render VN's in general. First and foremost, the art content is way higher than in tradional drawn VN's. I guess it's way easier to come up with lots of render images and even animations if you have a finished scene in your 3D-render program. Roughly estimated, traditional 2D VN's usually have around 100 - 200 CG's if you include backgrounds, but 3D ones have thousands of CG's. Though it has to be considered that 2D VN's usually create their scenes on the fly by adding sprites in different poses to a background. In 3D VN's those are all pre-rendered.
However, a common problem of the 3D VN's is still the somewhat synthetic look of render scenes and as nice as animations are, they often feel unnatural if you do them without motion capturing. Though both VN's made huge improvements in that regard through the chapters. On the other hand, rendering seems to be a good technique if you want to produce glamour girls with an emphasis on sex appeal. While the faces are still a bit of a problem, hot appealing bodies seem to be easy - there's certainly a lot of potential in 3D VN's with an emphasis on sex. It can't really compare with the 'cuteness' aspect of manga art though. If you want adorable characters there's nothing to see here.

Style differences:
Another point that stood out amongst both VN's is the unique western style of them. The age group of young women in the age of 20 - 30 almost doesn't exist in Japanese VN's. Judging by appearance it usually goes from 5 - 15... and then continues with 30+ in milf nukiges. :lol: Furthermore, since there's fortunately no obsession with school life scenarios, the heroines are older and more mature (and slutty) and less childish than their Japanese counterparts. The pacing is also way faster - almost too fast sometimes. But I definitely appreciate that they don't stretch 5 minutes of story content to 50 hours of slice of life like Japanese VN's.

Overall ratings:
Acting Lessons: 6.5/10
Deprived Awakening: 7/10
But Acting Lessons had best waifu with Melissa... :rolleyes:

I've also tried the first three chapters of the upcoming City of broken Dreamers, the successor of Depraced Awakening and I was quite impressed to be honest. It has a cool cyber punk scenario and is more plot focused than its predecessor. And the technical advancements in comparions to the last title are impressive. There's certainly a huge potential here for western developers to make their own thing. Think 'Resident Evil 2 - The Visual Novel' with Leon as protagonist, Claire as waifu and Sherry as walking hugging pillow. Well, I guess I can dream... :wub:

Edited by ChaosRaven
Posted
1 hour ago, ChaosRaven said:

Depraved Awakening

This one has gone completely under my radar, just like basically all other 3D EVNs (Acting Lessons was my first and so far only one). It sounds interesting enough, so I picked it up on Steam just now and will probably read it when I'm done with Evenicle in the next week or so!

Posted
5 hours ago, Seraphim88 said:

This one has gone completely under my radar, just like basically all other 3D EVNs (Acting Lessons was my first and so far only one). It sounds interesting enough, so I picked it up on Steam just now and will probably read it when I'm done with Evenicle in the next week or so!

Actually, your conversation with @adamstan a while ago inspired me to play those two titles. :rolleyes:

Posted

Heh, I had totally forgotten that a mention of Depraved Awakening was what initially brought us into that conversation. I guess it's less a case of it going under my radar, and more one of me having a faulty memory unit then. :P

Posted
8 hours ago, ChaosRaven said:

I've also tried the first three chapters of the upcoming City of broken Dreamers, the successor of Depraced Awakening and I was quite impressed to be honest. It has a cool cyber punk scenario and is more plot focused than its predecessor.

Yeah, it sits pretty high on my wishlist. But I guess we'll have to wait at least about a year for it to be finished - unless the author suddenly speeds up his work ;)

Posted
28 minutes ago, adamstan said:

Yeah, it sits pretty high on my wishlist. But I guess we'll have to wait at least about a year for it to be finished - unless the author suddenly speeds up his work ;)

Yes, this will probably take a while, but 'Being a DIK - Season 1', the successor to 'Acting Lessons', will be released next week and I'll probably check that out as well. I guess it won't be too long anyway, so it should be easy to squish inbetween the other VN's I'm currently reading.

Posted

With some nostalgia for old JAST titles I read xChange 1-3. I had played a lot of the JAST games way back when, but this was one series that still remained on my want to read list that I didn't get around to.
All of the games are clearly outdated and the shift of how VNs are written can be seen in this series to some extent. The first one is all over the place with shifts in tone, logic and character personalities.
The further the series progressed, the more these mistakes get remedied, but none of them get it quite right, since they don't stop putting unreasonable h-scenes into the games. After those, every attempt of serious storytelling just didn't reach me anymore, even though they got surprisingly real at times.
Can't say I didn't expect it, it's like many other old JAST games in that respect, mostly read through them to appease my OCD. It was on my want to read list at some point, so I had to go through with it. No regrets, but I can't recommend them either.
xChange 1 4/10, xChange 2 5/10, xChange 3 5/10

Besides that I read Wabisabi and it's pretty mediocre, a very basic homecoming story with the deal sweetened by some cute animal girls. There is not much depth to it, but it's not terrible either, if you're into animal girls and want a short story without too much conflict or downers to just have a sort of Iyashikei experience, it might be worth checking out. 6/10

The reason I even read those was because I finished Ikusa Megami Zero with over 80 hours "played". That's because the game played by itself most of the time and I read other stuff while it did. During auto-battles I read all of the 4 VNs above and the common route and 2 of the girl routes of My fair Princess. That kind of worked out for me, but it obviously shouldn't be the way the game is played.
The JRPG aspect of the game is much too easy, I didn't even grind, it just kind of naturally occured. I'm very thorough during dungeon exploration and regularly lightly overleveled because of it. In this game that was enough to skip most of the gameplay, which is kind of a shame after setting up all those game mechanics. You could consider it my fault for playing that way, but I don't think that's the case, exploring every angle is the point of the dungeon crawler and the turn-based battles becoming redundant in the process is definitely bad tuning.
Speaking of bad tuning, the end game aspect in this game is ridiculous. I did 2 of the after-game bosses with each fight taking over half an hour, even with capped 99999 damage rolls on some characters and the enemy barely doing damage to me. (I stopped partway during the second boss, because there clearly was no point to it, Kamidori Alchemy Meister had much better post-credit content)
It took me about 20 hours after finishing the game to get the content I missed because of choices. I do save separately about every hour when I play these kinds of games, but the choices take effect some time later and there was a lot to replay because of that and only about half an hour of that was actually new (inconsequential) content. That ratio left me kind of underwhelmed and I can't recommend doing that to anyone. Some of those optional bits were unedited machine translations to boot.
That's a lot of bad points but I still liked this game a lot. I rarely had this feeling of true epic fantasy in a VN, even though it takes dips into sexual magic a bit too much. (Gotta get that H-content in there somehow) The protagonist had a substantial role in this world, but it still felt like the world would go on existing without him and the story took a lot of unexpected turns in interesting directions. Story wise it never got boring and I also liked the dungeon crawling with some little secrets, puzzles and generally good design. A flawed but very worthwhile experience. 8/10

I could sum up My fair Princess in one word. Boring. Or in another word. Lazy. The girl routes are textbook examples with nothing memorable in them. The girls are either bland, stupid or both and the protagonist has the most boring attitude and reactions I can remember witnessing in a VN. Sometimes VNs have unlikeable protagonists or girls, but in this one I was indifferent towards all of them, which was even worse. It's a bit sad, because the theme wasn't that bad in theory. The protagonist is poor but with a loving family and the girls are rich with dysfunctional families, a good contrast, surely nothing completely new, but a VN that completely focuses on that and explores it from different angles could have been interesting. The explored stories however feel samey, the bland heroines don't help at all and the protagonist just lets the story impartially pass him by, the story resolves in some dumb way and the credits roll. I don't think this is worth anyone's time. 4/10

 

By the way, anyone having thoughts if the machine translations of the Eushully games in the Ikusa Megami series are worth it?

Posted
3 hours ago, Ruberick said:

they don't stop putting unreasonable h-scenes into the games.

Well, they're nukige after all ;)

3 hours ago, Ruberick said:

I could sum up My fair Princess in one word. Boring. Or in another word. Lazy. The girl routes are textbook examples with nothing memorable in them. The girls are either bland, stupid or both and the protagonist has the most boring attitude and reactions I can remember witnessing in a VN. Sometimes VNs have unlikeable protagonists or girls, but in this one I was indifferent towards all of them, which was even worse. It's a bit sad, because the theme wasn't that bad in theory. The protagonist is poor but with a loving family and the girls are rich with dysfunctional families, a good contrast, surely nothing completely new, but a VN that completely focuses on that and explores it from different angles could have been interesting. The explored stories however feel samey, the bland heroines don't help at all and the protagonist just lets the story impartially pass him by, the story resolves in some dumb way and the credits roll. I don't think this is worth anyone's time. 4/10

Ouch, that makes me sad :( I had high hopes for this title. Will try it when it comes up with some decent discount on Steam sale then ;)

Posted
2 hours ago, adamstan said:

Well, they're nukige after all ;)

Maybe that was poorly worded. I meant to stress unreasonable. A nukige can have a lot of (in-universe) reasonable h-scenes, but when the protagonist shrugs of being raped like mosquito bites and an orgy bus freely drives through the town, then it's pretty hard to take one of the heroines depression and coping after losing her boyfriend to a terminal illness seriously. It just creates too big shifts in tone.

2 hours ago, adamstan said:

Ouch, that makes me sad :( I had high hopes for this title. Will try it when it comes up with some decent discount on Steam sale then ;)

Sure, go for it given the opportunity. I wouldn't give a cent for this in hindsight, but opinions are still just opinions and I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this, especially from people who have read a lot of VNs allready and will recognize the (lazy) tropes that are used in this one.

Posted
5 minutes ago, Ruberick said:

I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this, especially from people who have read a lot of VNs allready and will recognize the (lazy) tropes that are used in this one.

I haven't read that many, compared to some of the veterans ;)

I've read one of the older PeasSoft's titles - Koi Iro Chu! Lips. While it was filled with popular tropes, I still enjoyed it, because they executed those tropes reasonably well, and I liked the characters. So I guess that's how it is with me - I'm okay even with seemingly overused tropes if they are executed well. It's a problem however, if the execution itself is also lazy.

 

On a side note - recently I browsed my reading history on vndb, since I've been filling out start and finish dates. It struck me, that in 2018 I've read over twice as many VNs when compared with 2019. Incidentally, 2019 was the year when I started reading untranslated titles. And I guess it shows how much slower I am when reading in JP compared to EN. "Medium" sized VN would typically take me around a week when reading translated, but untranslated it can easily take one month or more - it takes around a week to finish one route ;)

Posted
6 hours ago, Ruberick said:

By the way, anyone having thoughts if the machine translations of the Eushully games in the Ikusa Megami series are worth it?

I don't check Verita yet, although looking from other Eushully VNs that use MTL, there's a chance that it night not worth it especially if I remember Soukoku no Arterial here. So yeah just don't play it, because you'll have a hard time to understand the dialogue from text alone if the narration translation is really bad.

Posted
1 hour ago, adamstan said:

I've read one of the older PeasSoft's titles - Koi Iro Chu! Lips. While it was filled with popular tropes, I still enjoyed it, because they executed those tropes reasonably well, and I liked the characters.

I didn't particularly like that one either. At some point I started remembering it as the VN I kept forgetting I had read before. :D
I actually even went back into the game and reread parts of it to figure out why I couldn't remember and it wasn't too bad honestly, just nothing too memorable but at least some likeable heroines.

In My fair Princess however I really felt like they didn't try at all to make it engaging and every route felt like a chore. (The best parts for me were the common route and the protagonists relationship with his family)

41 minutes ago, littleshogun said:

I don't check Verita yet, although looking from other Eushully VNs that use MTL, there's a chance that it night not worth it especially if I remember Soukoku no Arterial here. So yeah just don't play it, because you'll have a hard time to understand the dialogue from text alone if the narration translation is really bad.

Well, I thought so. Maybe at some point a group tries to edit them or make a proper translation, or I brush up on my japanese beyond hiragana/katakana...

Posted (edited)
5 minutes ago, Ruberick said:

I didn't particularly like that one either. At some point I started remembering it as the VN I kept forgetting I had read before.

I see. Now we have some common point of reference at least. And it means, that after all there is some tiny chance that I might still like My Fair Princess ;) (unless it's much worse)

Edited by adamstan

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