ValiDate - an upcoming (and unsurprisingly racist) visual novel made by SJW's, for SJW's. Currently MIA.

Thought I'd check in on the struggling goblinoids in our area, and to my shock and amazement it's not complete vaporware yet, they're still sticking to a September release date and have released a shitty trailer to boot.

Trailer post (Archive)



It's... Honestly kind of mediocre, IMO. Like the voiceover and the background track are done well enough to be bland and forgettable, but where this trailer shines is the shitty game it's showing off. It's damn hard to make a dating sim/visual novel look action-packed and exciting through a trailer, and while this tries it fails spectacularly. All the peppy soundtrack in the world can't really disguise that the game consists of scrolling text and images that occasionally change expression and pose, and the interactions they portray just kind of look dull, awkward, and uncomfortable rather than compelling. The most fun looking thing in this whole mess is the fishing minigame, and even that's been done way better a thousand times elsewhere.
 
Thought I'd check in on the struggling goblinoids in our area, and to my shock and amazement it's not complete vaporware yet, they're still sticking to a September release date and have released a shitty trailer to boot.

Trailer post (Archive)



It's... Honestly kind of mediocre, IMO. Like the voiceover and the background track are done well enough to be bland and forgettable, but where this trailer shines is the shitty game it's showing off. It's damn hard to make a dating sim/visual novel look action-packed and exciting through a trailer, and while this tries it fails spectacularly. All the peppy soundtrack in the world can't really disguise that the game consists of scrolling text and images that occasionally change expression and pose, and the interactions they portray just kind of look dull, awkward, and uncomfortable rather than compelling. The most fun looking thing in this whole mess is the fishing minigame, and even that's been done way better a thousand times elsewhere.
Funny that the trailer mentions deoderant when it looks like the females and the trans-looking one probably don't use it.
 
This is it? This is seriously the best validate could do with all that money backing them? Oh my shitballs, I don’t even know where to begin. Seriously, was THAT the voice they had to use? Out of everything? No offence to the voice actor but it literally sounds like those poorly translated unskippable game ads you get on YouTube and the music doesn’t help its case either. The writing is horrendous — you’d think Dani knows her audience well enough to stay away from the immense cringe of using internet lingo in advertisement. Yuck. And why did they need a voice explaining the entire game anyway? It’s a visual NOVEL, what possible instructions do you need that you can’t literally click and find out for yourself?

Also, the reason validate has a fishing mini game is solely due to this popular tumblr post:
6D9C5AA8-90CB-43FE-A76F-A54E20B7070F.jpeg

That’s literally the reason why. Literally. Dani is desperate to appeal to the tumblroids and their money any way she can.
 
I couldn't make it past the first few seconds of that trailer. That voice encapsulates everything about Dani trying to act professional and sell me her snake oil product and it got under my skin real fast.

With this on the horizon, I'm feeling nostalgic and rather downtrodden about the path particularly visual novels have taken since I discovered them years ago.

One of the last Western teams whose VN output I enjoyed was in the shape of Arcade Spirits. It had its problems but overall, it had charm and was something I looked forward to continuing.

The sequel was a mess. It didn't improve on any parts of the original and instead made the bad parts worse. Romance desperately needed work and while not strictly necessary, they could have done a lot to streamline the player character so you didn't look like you were in a completely different product alongside the other character sprites. What they did for the sequel was shoehorn romance to a single 'vacation episode' chapter that has next to no build up (similar to the first game I think, but worse), and de-shape the character creation so you basically cannot make anything resembling an attractive woman/non-soyed man because non-binary, trans, whatever the fuck. But hey, you can have xir/xe pronouns!

The story itself was convoluted with several plotlines fighting for attention, no characters really getting a proper arc because everyone's screen time is chewed away by some woke propaganda dialogue like how self-driving cars are the future and people should accept that! (Never mind that the primary antagonist is an AI gone rogue.) Or how it's so upsetting that someone would play an RPG and kill all the NPCs! (Ignoring the fact that the Chad in question provided feedback by saying of course he'd kill them when he got EXP for killing them and the game had zero setbacks or safeguards programmed into it to prevent such behavior or even try to lure the player away from doing something people do in the majority of games that aren't Undertale - whose entire magic moment was people realizing that you were awarded a difference in gameplay and story because the game anticipated that you would act in the default way.)

I could go on and on. I really fucking could.

I look at the overabundance of furry bullshit, 3D sex game grifts, and unfinished demos with projects that'll likely never see fruition post the Kickstarter/fundraising period and wonder what the heck happened to the days of old, where you could get hours upon hours of fairly good entertainment for free. Not that they need to be free, but how come it's so rare to find that level of quality in paid products in this circle?

I suppose the issue lies in the fact that I think a lot of the types that could have come together for things like visual novels in the west are so far infected with woke bullshit and their desire to be some of the worst capitalism has to offer that it's all so screwed. And with no big studios caring for run of the mill, small scale story-focused games let alone the fringe craft of visual novels, there's no monetary drive for people with more resources and maybe slightly less bias to push out VNs.

Unless, of course, it's those shitty mobile "VNs" for 13 year olds with no attention span that requires 15 bucks to have the honor of reading another two minutes of meaningless filler.

I'm very sad on the internet.
 
Laughably, the core of this wave of feminism and woke culture is a visceral hatred and jealousy of women from both women and men. Thus you get the un-womaning of many aspects of society and a hatred of femininity standards that not all women can achieve. Instead of being content with the fact that now every chick is going to have tits like Sydney Sweeney or working to achieve the slim bodies of the women in magazines, they have decided instead to rally around their unwillingness to work for fucking anything and turn it into a shield of armor to protect themselves from what is basically petty teenage girl bullying and backstabbing on a global scale.

Of course none of the women here are gonna look hot or even cute and moderately attractive. The women head deep in this bullshit cannot stand another woman being openly admired.

And yet gay visual novels seem to very much embrace stereotypically attractive men fucking each others' brains out. Even something as "wholesome" as Dream Daddy had a cast of not-disgusting men on display that these women would want to fuck. Because they all want tens as their personality circles the drain and shoots them into the negatives.
 
I remembered seeing these screenshots floating around on twitter.
CA40D16C-3976-4194-9645-64479502C25B.jpeg27221B91-23A4-47D0-96AF-C75FFCFC331F.jpeg531D5220-14A2-44E4-8455-1F99211CD225.jpegAEA96546-C8A9-477A-88A5-FDCA6CCFB82F.jpeg
“The light-skinned player in you comes out in full effect” :story: Cringe.

Thought I'd check in on the struggling goblinoids in our area, and to my shock and amazement it's not complete vaporware yet, they're still sticking to a September release date and have released a shitty trailer to boot.

Trailer post (Archive)



It's... Honestly kind of mediocre, IMO. Like the voiceover and the background track are done well enough to be bland and forgettable, but where this trailer shines is the shitty game it's showing off. It's damn hard to make a dating sim/visual novel look action-packed and exciting through a trailer, and while this tries it fails spectacularly. All the peppy soundtrack in the world can't really disguise that the game consists of scrolling text and images that occasionally change expression and pose, and the interactions they portray just kind of look dull, awkward, and uncomfortable rather than compelling. The most fun looking thing in this whole mess is the fishing minigame, and even that's been done way better a thousand times elsewhere.
9379081D-08B4-448E-9CAF-455CFA50D016.jpeg
I thought they were having public sex at first.

It's funny how they made the men handsome while the females look like trogdolites and orcs at best. Wait, no, modern orcs can look beautiful.
Because tumblr (her target audience) is full of fujos.
 
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