I've got a bit of a backlog myself with VN/ADV titles, but mainly this is because I don't actually play many at all, if I'm gonna be honest.
I had watched the Steins;Gate anime some years ago (and I know I'm about to get called a retarded faggot for not playing the games first) but I've finally gotten around to playing the actual games now. The initial "phone trigger" controls are kind of annoyingly counterintuitive the first time you're tasked to use them but otherwise the game's pretty solid. My friend has Steins;Gate Elite on their Switch and I checked that out too, but I much prefer the original game. I do wish I had played this game blind as fuck, and I mean this by not even watching the anime, because once I knew what to do getting the true ending wasn't too hard. I imagine it'd be a lot more to pull off had I not really known the general gist of the game's full plot beforehand.
But really my thoughts on the game? It's definitely as good as people say it is, I had a ton of fun even with my prior experience with the plot and what would happen. Once I think I get through this and 100% it, I would definitely play Steins;Gate 0 afterward. (Yes, I saw the anime for that too. The anime is a mess, I hear the game is much, much better.) But even then, I might just replay the first game again and go for certain routes again, after all, why not, I had fun doing them the first time after all.
Oh, and for fun, I snagged the ROM image for the 8Bit Steins;Gate port off of a ROM site. Even for a NES/Famicom ADV/VN title this thing... kind of fucking sucks? It's a shame too, they could have totally cooked with it but they dropped the ball massively. The plot doesn't make a lot of sense even with the "other timelines" excuse, the gameplay is kind of tedious at times, and there's a lot of "gotcha" moments that not even a real Famicom VN would do. Hell, if you do Game Over, you're basically forced to replay the entire game from start to finish again. The lack of a save system is completely retarded, but I guess it's fair when the entire game doesn't have much to it despite all of that. I guess as a bonus extra item it's nice, but I'd have preferred if they at least gave any sort of shit at all when it came to making it.
And for some extra fun, I looked into the credits for the NES port a while ago, nothing too crazy but this specific NES port's music was
produced by a troon that I
posted about in the past (don't believe me on the troon front?
look at that mess, lol) xhey have their troon name listed in the credits but anyone can dig up the real one with enough effort (it's Jason Nisperos and it's all over a lot of early 2000s chiptune stuff they made back in the day). And considering how bad the game they did was, it really does explain part of the quality of that game's production.
Outside of SciAdv titles, I remember in a few circles that Dohna Dohna was picking up popularity and I went to check it out out of curiosity. And to be honest the game is one of those ones where I swear it could just stand as a standard VN-esque title without the lewd content. I know that's like the entire point of the game (and I don't mind my lewd shit now and then), but it literally has a "Streamer Mode" where you can turn all of that off, so it's clear the game doesn't exactly need it. Playing through it, the plot is kind of silly and the game even pokes fun at some of the more obvious plot holes, but I do genuinely enjoy the game's battle system as funny as it sounds, since it feels more added for the sake of continuing its riff on Persona's aesthetics. It's simple but the nature of the way the battle system works (player character placement matters for attacking moves and also for how enemy attacks affect your characters, same with the enemy encounters in the game) is quite engaging and I'd certainly love to play another sort of game with that system integrated.
Oh and I have to mention the music, because for whatever reason the sound team behind the game decided that they would try absolutely way too damn hard for it. It's great and anyone I talked to who knows about the game mentions how good the music is too.
Outside of those two, I could probably blabber on about a bunch of VNs I played using various Japanese PC emulators (eg: Dokyuusei) or my personal experience with the few games on the Famicom that would eventually fall under the "VN" category (such as Metal Slader Glory), but I don't think people here really care about those too much by comparison.
I kinda miss this era of CG art. Every illustration nowadays is this maximally-safe, overproduced LN-bait monstrosity done using the same handful of CSP brushes and tools.
I do too, but the problem I personally have is for every good 2000s-era game CG there's like 5 of them that are just anatomy fails in some of the worst ways that it's hard to just laugh at it and move on and instead it takes away from the experience because it's so distracting. I personally enjoy the later half of the 2000s aesthetically when it comes to anime artstyles, it's still very unique in how everything looks but it feels a lot more "refined" in terms of consistency. But you're right that the newer stuff feels almost entirely homogenized and it kinda sucks as a result.
Part of what made me like Dohna Dohna is the fact that the artist at least...
tries to look more unique, but it's mainly in the coloring choices and not really how they draw the characters.
Planetarian is very nice and you should read it. Very short but still hurt my feelings big time. I don't really have the time for long VN's anymore so short ones like this are cool.
I got Planetarian when it was free (or cheap, don't remember) on steam. The original one mind you, and it was a really cool story. But yeah that game does evoke some serious feels.
Also someone mentioned Muv Luv earlier in the thread and I wanted to check that out but I never got around to it. Judging by the reactions of others who have played it (not just the people in this thread), I'm guessing I'm gonna get sucker punched in the gut with some serious feels.
