Statistical Experiment: Most Overlooked VNs

[onorub]

Looking at EroGameScape and VNDB, i've noticed that there are some VNs that have fairly good average ratings but get screwed over in VNDB rankings via bayesian rating due to low number of votes, so i wanted to register the ones that i saw as recommendations.

Note that those are all untranslated and i have not played any of them, so these recommendations are purely from the data i got.

Diabolique
Triangle Heart 2
Triangle Heart 3
D+Vine [Luv]
Elysion
Koigokoro
Lien
Rasen Kairou
Rasen Kairou 2
Cosmos no Sora ni
Flutter of Birds
Tsukikagerou
Pandora no Yume
Sekai no Subete
Rocket no Natsu
Patissier na Nyanko
Folklore Jam
Tenohira o, Taiyou ni
Ricotte
Himawari no Chapel de Kimi to
Sugar+Spice!

If anyone knows how good those actually are please tell about it to make the thread richer.

[Funnerific]

Playing Tenohira o, Taiyou ni right now actually, can confirm there's a lot more to it than one might think. Also the description on VNDB is 90% off, like literally wrong, I'll rewrite it once I've finished the game.

Got plans to play Tsukikagerou one day too.

Edited October 6, 2017 by Funnerific

[Clephas]

43 minutes ago, onorub said:

Looking at EroGameScape and VNDB, i've noticed that there are some VNs that have fairly good average ratings but get screwed over in VNDB rankings via bayesian rating due to low number of votes, so i wanted to register the ones that i saw as recommendations.

Note that those are all untranslated and i have not played any of them, so these recommendations are purely from the data i got.

Diabolique
Triangle Heart 2
Triangle Heart 3
D+Vine [Luv]
Elysion
Koigokoro
Lien
Rasen Kairou
Rasen Kairou 2
Cosmos no Sora ni
Flutter of Birds
Tsukikagerou
Pandora no Yume
Sekai no Subete
Rocket no Natsu
Patissier na Nyanko
Folklore Jam
Tenohira o, Taiyou ni
Ricotte
Himawari no Chapel de Kimi to
Sugar+Spice!

If anyone knows how good those actually are please tell about it to make the thread richer.

Something to keep in mind is that Erogamescape is even more unreliable than vndb, due to paid mass voting...

[onorub]

5 minutes ago, Clephas said:

Something to keep in mind is that Erogamescape is even more unreliable than vndb, due to paid mass voting...

Really? I know they have broader definitions of what a VN is (they somehow have Touhou and Persona in there), but i didn't think people took their eroge that seriously.

[Clephas]

50 minutes ago, onorub said:

Really? I know they have broader definitions of what a VN is (they somehow have Touhou and Persona in there), but i didn't think people took their eroge that seriously.

The companies take it seriously.  The larger companies, especially the ones specializing in charage/moege types, have developed a habit of competing with one another by influencing opinion through paid voting on sites like Erogamescape... It doesn't make a huge difference, but it is usually enough to inflate a mediocre charage's numbers by 15-25% in the first year (after the first year, you generally get a snowball effect, because of 'oh, all those people liked it' ).  That is the main reason why at least two-thirds of the top ten games in any given year on Erogamescape are high-budget pieces of mediocre moe-bait.

Edit: Incidentally, in an industry where a few hundred extra sales can make the difference between being in the red and making a profit, this is actually a highly cost-effective methodology... since the investment is far less than a commercial on a local TV station in Japan, lol.

Edited October 6, 2017 by Clephas

[ittaku]

I enjoyed Sugar+Spice! for what it's worth. It was a little less story-like in the way it worked since you chose "scenes" from each heroine or mixtures of heroines and they had to try and tie the overall story with random scenes. Some were mandatory ones that advanced time forward as the stronger storytelling components. There was a unique confession system though, where you tried to get enough goodwill with one of the heroines and you called her out to a famous park location to try and confess to the heroine and be accepted or rejected. Of course it wasn't that simple since repeat failed attempts worked against you and some heroines may not have accepted you via confession. The girls were interesting, the overall story was fun enough and the confession scene always gave me a lump in the throat so it was quite good. I loved Uta in this one.

Additionally, I played the sequel Sugar+Spice2! as well (I bought them both while in Japan on a whim based on the description of the confession system) and this was the same system but new heroines and set slightly in the future with lots of cameos from characters from the first. I enjoyed this one a lot less, simply because I didn't like as many of the heroines - some plain annoyed me, but some of the heroines I really enjoyed (I loved Fuuka.) It was a little annoying compared to the first because you had to actually play each heroine through multiple times (though you could skip the actual playback of scenes and just collect good will points) to get to some of the extra scenes as though you were somehow closer to the heroine on subsequent plays. I never managed to collect all the scenes - just tried to get all the love+H scenes as the rest felt like a grind.

They both had a great system where you could look at what you'd unlocked and rewatch any scene in particular and get an idea of how much you'd cleared and that you might have missed something special to your liking (like more H.)

The company that brought these two games out had a new system for their sequel game, Watashi ga Suki nara "Suki" tte Itte! with all new updated graphics and so on, and they announced an official localisation from mangagamer(?) on this forum. I haven't played this one yet but I'm actually looking forward to it a lot based on the previous ones. It looks even more dating sim like from the screenshots https://vndb.org/v17376

E: I posted something about S+S2 in the untranslated thread a while back.