Conjueror’s VN of the Year (2016) Tournament

[Vorathiel]

3 hours ago, Dergonu said:

It did indeed just kind of pass by most people, but it was a very good read if you ask me. (I actually listed it as the best TLed game I read all year. Then again, I didn't read too many, but still.)

Tbh it's probably fine not including it, with the small amount of people who actually read it. Not a lot of people know about it tbh, so it wouldn't get a lot of votes.

People should read it though. It has a really good story and is completely different from most yuri games released which focus only on cute moe and fluffy romance. The bad ends are chilling and the good ends are beautiful. Overall a very unique and entertaining VN.

I just finished Flowers and I'm in love with non fluffy lesbian games. Nurses have nice graphics, so I'll probably give it a shot in not so distant future. But is there any place I can read your wider opinion on this?

[Dergonu]

11 minutes ago, Vorathiel said:

I just finished Flowers and I'm in love with non fluffy lesbian games. Nurses have nice graphics, so I'll probably give it a shot in not so distant future. But is there any place I can read your wider opinion on this?

I considered making a blog post on it, but never actually did it.

Since I haven't played Flowers, I can't compare the two, but Nurse Love Addiction has a nice mixture of some slice of life moments, goofy humor/ romance, drama and interesting plot. The focus is actually on the plot a lot more than the romance towards the later parts of the game, and the mystery element is very interesting. The mystery spans over all the routes, so it's one of those games where reading all the routes is pretty important. (Except for Kaede's route. That one is rather self contained, unlike the other 3.) 

You won't be able to escape the unavoidable cute romance moments of course, but the game is completely different from your standard yuri titles. I recommend playing it for sure.

[ChaosRaven]

38 minutes ago, Conjueror said:

Um, I'm not sure why you are so angry, but as I've already said, I basically just used my top best rated video data and randomly added Harmonia and Memory's Dogma to fill in the spots for extra fodder (so yeah, it's basically top 10 best rated VNs this year + 6 extra picks I personally thought were interesting + 2 random extras that I thought I might as well use because I ran out of ideas).
I thought MYTH deserved an honorable mention because it has an 84 median on egs.

I'm not really angry but I think if you want to hold a 'public contest' you should leave it to the public what they like most and not just manipulate the available choices so that the end result fits your liking. You've 16 titles in your contest and you just admtted that 8 of them were just included because of personal preference while you intentionally ommited some titles that might have a significant impact on the contest.

Your contest last year got a lot of attention, so this one might too. And as such it might influence common opinion. And the possible consequence might be that people will argue that title X wasn't popular because it didn't appear in your contest while title Y might gain more attention than it deserves. That wouldn't be a problem if it would be seen as just your personal favorite list, but it would be if the list gets treated as the 'common unbiased' opinion of the VN community. If you're actively manipulating that list in such a way it's simply not fair play anymore. I wouldn't mind if it would just be a few titles, but we're talking about half of the titles that were chosen for the contest. And I do think that's valid criticism and not just me being a bit grumpy.

[Conjueror]

1 hour ago, ChaosRaven said:

I'm not really angry but I think if you want to hold a 'public contest' you should leave it to the public what they like most and not just manipulate the available choices so that the end result fits your liking. You've 16 titles in your contest and you just admtted that 8 of them were just included because of personal preference while you intentionally ommited some titles that might have a significant impact on the contest.

Your contest last year got a lot of attention, so this one might too. And as such it might influence common opinion. And the possible consequence might be that people will argue that title X wasn't popular because it didn't appear in your contest while title Y might gain more attention than it deserves. That wouldn't be a problem if it would be seen as just your personal favorite list, but it would be if the list gets treated as the 'common unbiased' opinion of the VN community. If you're actively manipulating that list in such a way it's simply not fair play anymore. I wouldn't mind if it would just be a few titles, but we're talking about half of the titles that were chosen for the contest. And I do think that's valid criticism and not just me being a bit grumpy.

Yeah, I guess I'll consult the community before launching next year, if I'll be doing this again. I wasn't trying to omit promising titles out of spite though. Nekopara honestly never even occurred to me before you mentioned it, but it has multiple problems besides that it's not exactly critically-acclaimed. It's an unfinished episodic VN that is pretty much a franchise at this point and has been around since 2014. It's a bad idea to include fan discs / sequels with big established fanbases because ppl who haven't read them will vote for them anyway... so I'm not sure what I'll do with Majikoi-A even when it fully comes out... I guess we'll see if I fucked it up by making an exception for Grisaia already (I mainly did that because there are a lot of ppl that have very different opinion about it than the original, me included). Funbag Fantasy is one title I really wanted to include, but as I explained before, it would have most likely turned into a joke entry and derailed the competition. All the rest of the titles mentioned in this thread would have dropped out during the first round anyway, and I think my picks were better (if I could go back in time I'd probably exchange Memory's Dogma and Harmonia with Nurse Love Addiction and that August fan-tled game, but that's about it... and they'd still drop out on the first round).

I want this to be a fair and interesting competition between avid VN readers who follow new releases, not established fanbases and name recognition (also, there are 18 titles in total). Maybe I should have just included the best rated ten, in that case people could have complained at vndb instead of me (as I bet every game released this year has at least one person who'd argue they should be on this).

Edited January 6, 2017 by Conjueror

[ChaosRaven]

6 hours ago, Conjueror said:

I want this to be a fair and interesting competition between avid VN readers who follow new releases, not established fanbases and name recognition (also, there are 18 titles in total). Maybe I should have just included the best rated ten, in that case people could have complained at vndb instead of me (as I bet every game released this year has at least one person who'd argue they should be on this).

Yes, since you've used VNDB for the top ten, it would have probably been best to stick to that rating for choosing the other titles. It just looks weird if you exclude some titles because of low VNDB ratings but leave oddities like Memory's Dogma in.

Though the popularity of a title is not only measured by the height of the rating but also the vote count. I know for a fact that some people prefer to not vote for a title instead of just giving it a low rating. So having a high vote count is usually a plus. For example, you also didn't include Koiken Otome because it just got a rating of 7.03, but it got more than 600 votes. In comparison, the top rated VN Fata Morgana just got 371 votes. So technically, the fairest rating would probably the bayesian one from VNDB. But well, even that 's problematic because it penalizes titles released at the end of the year... 

Anyway, I'm aware that this is just a fun contest, so don't take my criticism too seriously. 

Edited January 6, 2017 by ChaosRaven

[Conjueror]

I wonder if my brain blocks Yuzusoft or something, but I somehow managed to miss it everywhere, even in Decay's post. Looking at it now, damn... it should have been in my top 10 best rated list. I'm pretty sure I looked through that Fuwanovel's list and then used all the filters to see VN translations released in 2016 on vndb and still didn't see it.

Anyway, in response to all of the recommendations in this thread I'm thinking to add two more groups:

E) Bunny Black 2/Koiken Otome/Beat Blades Haruka/Majikoi A1-A2
F) Funbag Fantasy/Yoake Mae yori Ruri Iro/Nurse Love Addiction/Dracu-Riot

I reeeeally hope none of these games break something, especially Majikoi......
Maybe I'll make an extra round with Nekopara after all is over too.

 

[ChaosRaven]

Adding those two groups sounds like a great idea. 

Meanwhile at VNDB... Decay seems to fight for the splitting of the Majikoi A titles. lol

[Vorathiel]

Thanks for head up, I will agree with him in that thread, cause it's a right cause worth fighting for.

[kyrt]

6 hours ago, Conjueror said:

Anyway, in response to all of the recommendations in this thread I'm thinking to add two more groups:

E) Bunny Black 2/Koiken Otome/Beat Blades Haruka/Majikoi A1-A2
F) Funbag Fantasy/Yoake Mae yori Ruri Iro/Nurse Love Addiction/Dracu-Riot

 

When did Dracu-Riot get a full release or is that a joke?

[Vorathiel]

Dracu Riot got an 'almost complete' release on 2nd day of April, with only one route or less untransalted. Fuwa people are translating that and editing whole translation for some time now, and gods bless them, but many people read DR in that 'unfinished' state.

[Fred the Barber]

I fully support the addition of Funbag Fantasy, at least. Purely on the story and the way it tells it, I honestly think it's better than most of the other games I've played on the existing bracket.

[Conjueror]

Well, that... complicates matters, but it already has more votes on vndb than Noble Works, so a lot of ppl seem to have read it already too.
I wonder if the improved release next year will count as a re-release or release too, lol.
Removing it at this point would upset the balance of Group F too, gnghngh. >_<

[littleshogun]

1 hour ago, Conjueror said:

Well, that... complicates matters, but it already has more votes on vndb than Noble Works, so a lot of ppl seem to have read it already too.
I wonder if the improved release next year will count as a re-release or release too, lol.
Removing it at this point would upset the balance of Group F too, gnghngh. >_<

While there's some complicated matter in Dracu Riot, ultimately the translation was quite fine to me if you ask my opinion. Although if you didn't want to enter Dracu Riot, perhaps Eiyuu Senki could be good candidate there because this year there's release which also included fully translated H Scenes, therefore completely translated all of the content (And made the announcement from JAST was even more redundant). The score and number of votes was quite good (7.78 average, 7.65 Bayesian, and 622 votes). Just saying here, and it's okay if you didn't want to accept my suggestion though.

[Conjueror]

25 minutes ago, littleshogun said:

While there's some complicated matter in Dracu Riot, ultimately the translation was quite fine to me if you ask my opinion. Although if you didn't want to enter Dracu Riot, perhaps Eiyuu Senki could be good candidate there because this year there's release which also included fully translated H Scenes, therefore completely translated all of the content (And made the announcement from JAST was even more redundant). The score and number of votes was quite good (7.78 average, 7.65 Bayesian, and 622 votes). Just saying here, and it's okay if you didn't want to accept my suggestion though.

I think I will use your suggestion. The fact the ps3 version was out a month before 2016 kinda puts it in an awkward position, but I guess most of the voting community here are primarily PC 18+ players, so I can make an exception for this...

[Funyarinpa]

I read very few 2016 releases so won't be participating probably, but FataMoru being seeded warms me up inside.