Key

[Vorathiel]

15 minutes ago, ChaosRaven said:

Pretty literaly. Let's see...

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...one heroine mass murders more than one billion people (~150 times more than the holocaust) with little to no regret except that she didn't get all humans because that's the only solution she could come up to solve the economic problems with her limited mind. And the other one wipes out a whole city with more than 100.000 people just because... why not?!

 

 O.o But that gives a 'scale' of this VN. Looking really forward to it now.

34 minutes ago, Okarin said:

Oh! No one mentioned that Key's humour can kill some people and it's not for everyone. Sometimes it's just cringeworthy.

Oh, I was just about to ask about humour. Hopefully it will 'click' with me.  (hey I even loved generally hated Muv-Luv Extra! ;d)

[Fred the Barber]

Wikipedia has a good, basically spoiler-free summary of what I mean when I say "Key formula" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_(company)#Impact:

"... Due to an influence by Leaf's visual novel To Heart released in 1997, the developers at Tactics created a simple formula for a game: a comedic first half with a heart-warming romantic middle followed by a tragic separation and finally an emotional reunion formed what is known as a 'crying game' or 'nakige'. The main purpose of such a game is to make the player feel for the characters and make them cry due to emotional scenarios which serves to leave a bigger impact on the player after the game is over."

That development team split off, formed Key, and released Kanon, which was kind of a big deal at the time. If you play Kanon now without context, you'll likely think "so what", because that formula is now pretty stock across the industry and the game, while fine, is far from innovative or interesting in any other ways. At the time, seemingly, that formula was not so cleanly-realized, and thus it was probably quite impactful at the time. So, maybe Key gets some points for innovation and impact, but that doesn't tell you much about whether more recent games putting that formula to use really make for an enjoyable game.

Little Busters! is a pretty pure realization of that formula, with an interesting extension of it by adding a "true route". Most interestingly, for the true route, Little Busters! even goes so far as to set aside romance in favor of telling a story about friendship. You'll see something similar in Rewrite, where the true route doesn't feature romance, and I suppose I've seen it rarely in other VNs (Majikoi's Agave route comes to mind... but Majikoi is a really hard-to-pin-down game), but I don't know how common that strategy is more broadly. At any rate, I love the true route to death in both Little Busters! and Rewrite. Little Busters! has some stumbling blocks along the way there, for sure - they all do. And it clearly doesn't work for everyone. But I can still work myself up to tears pretty easily by reflecting on that true route, so it sure works for me.

[Deep Blue]

Air is garbage leaving aside the summer route and some parts in misuzu is just plain boring and bad

Rewrite is pretty boring except for 1 or 2 good routes

Clannad is amazing, most of the routes are great, the humor is really good and the true route is fairly good too.

Little busters same as clannad

Kanon is hard to know if you are going to like it or not

One (is not from key but it's the same thing  ) maybe you will enjoy this one.