Visual Novels

[Exbein]

I've been playing this photo-realistic VN called "real-life". Not only is the dating non-linear, it's downright unpredictable and the sexual scenes are interactive and so immersive you feel like you're right in the story. I recommend it.

>not using cheat engine to give yourself infinite money to brute force girls to liking you

 

[Cabelaz]

muh kino

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

Thread, I'm vaguely interested, are there any visual novels out there that are so good you would recommend them to someone who outright doesn't like Visual Novels? To make a comparison to anime, I'd recommend a show like Cowboy Bebop even to people who don't like anime because the core Sci-Fi elements and world building are so tight, plus it has a good soundtrack. Is there anything like this you've encountered that might have a wider appeal?

So far the only VN I've played is Saya No Uta and much to my dismay there wasn't really a way to turn off the sex scenes. The Lovecraftian horror element was pretty well done though. I also had to bend over backwards to get it running on my system so I'd prefer to only go through that massive pain in the ass again if its a genre I'm interested in like horror or sci-fi.

The Ace Attorney games really are the pinnacle of the genre, as mentioned, but I'd argue there's another one that's almost a sure-fire win: VA-11 HALL-A. A quick enough glance at the pixel art and the soundtrack (you can get from the store page itself) will let you know if you enjoy the aesthetic. And honestly? I don't even necessarily care that much for cyberpunk settings or ideas -- it's just incredibly competent. Simple little story, simple little characters, simple little gameplay. It's not a terribly ambitious title, but it does what it sets out to achieve perfectly well- provide a comfy little insight into this particular world, an interesting enough protagonist's story, and great pacing all throughout. There's myriad references and in-jokes all over the place, but they're not the most annoying things.

It has endless imitators which are all complete and utter shit, so don't bother a lick with any of those - and if you'd had an experience with one, don't let it mar the guys who did it first and did it better.

And for one that's more traditional of a VN, Steins;Gate takes fucking forever to get going but it's a downright pleasure once all of the pieces are in motion. It has spectacularly over-the-top (japanese) voice acting and its story finds ways to pile on ever-increasingly absurd scenarios atop each other, but I'd mostly say that it's remarkable mostly for taking a story and characters that I absolutely despised and turning everything on its head to the point where I was cheering for the tard-in-charge. The problem is, it has perhaps one of the worst introductory arcs to a story I've ever experienced, and much of what follows the game's immediate middle point fills like dumb, hackneyed filler. To get the actually good ending which utterly redeems the game, it's also wholly mandatory that you follow a guide - the means by which you unlock it is incredibly fucking stupid.

Katawa Shoujo is also a particular and specific taste, though it has that ol' trademark of the genre - uncomfortable erotic content. Granted, compared to Saya no Uta, it's an absolute breeze. It's a very somber, mellow game which involves a lot of meditations on hardship, struggle, and overcoming one's limitations -- as well as of self-acceptance and of what happens to people who fall out of the good graces of normal society. It's baffling that a bunch of autists were the ones to make it in that regard. That said, the art is fairly discomforting and off-putting, the music isn't anything much to write home about, and the pacing really not that great until you fully unlock your 'route.' That'd be another thing I dislike about it - that stupid formula of "start at the beginning and what you choose guides you to the end," but there's really nothing compelling or interesting to do when you start again, so you just fast-forward through it all.

It's hard to really explain the genre's appeal on the whole, because you can define the entire genre as "wasted potential." Decision trees being used to tell branching narratives is really the most unique thing about this genre, yet most of them are incredibly linear and involve you just clicking away through short-enough blurbs which are fairly limited by so often being either dialogue or an inner monologue. For those who like that style of storytelling, though, there's just something about it.

Wonderful Everyday: Down the Rabbit-Hole (Visual Novel) - TV Tropes

Wonderful Everyday, known in Japan as Subarashiki Hibi: Furenzoku Sonzai (Japanese: 素晴らしき日々 ～不連続存在～, "Wonderful Everyday: Discontinuous Existence") …

tvtropes.org

i heard this is one of the greatest visual novel of all time.

Well, if it is, this genre's shit. I got suckered into this one - my curiosity got the better of me. I'll lay it out straight - this thing won't leave you up at night freaked out and disturbed and uncomfortable. It'll leave you annoyed at why the fuck such solid voice-acting and a cool-ass setup decided to get stuffed so they could release a thing with something like 4+ hours of people grunting and moaning baked in if you don't skip it all.

Spoiler: tl;dr not really worth it unless you like hour-long scenes of "..and then I fucked my dad!"

If this game didn't have its absolutely obnoxious erotic content, I would say I actually really enjoyed it. The first bit of erotic content is sissyfication COCKSUCKIN', which was funny enough to laugh at for about ten minutes. The scene took like twenty or thirty minutes to get through, just reading each line as a clicked. "What if there's something important about the character revealed during sexual trauma?" I figured. Nope - nope, it's all just wank material for crazy weirdos. There's nothing important in any of them, and yet they become so common that it's utterly obnoxious.

The game's first half is actually enjoyable beyond all of that. There's a lot of references to literature and oblique nods at philosophy which dot an interesting-enough mystery with characters that don't seem entirely flat. Particularly once you get past the 'intro' chapters, shit gets fucking nutty in a way that was genuinely phenomenal and like nothing else. My hopes for the payoff were really high...

...and then it just blows its load at the half-way point. It decides that it's done with the original story and intrigue, completely throws it away, and then essentially introduces a completely different story/mystery arc that it works through which is much more basic and bog standard for the genre. By this point, I was just bored with the game and it didn't really do anything much to keep my interest going. There are a fuckton of ominous, strange, and off-color comments made by characters in the first half which might be fun to puzzle out, but in the end the second half deflating everything and forcing me to wade through that goddamn annoying erotic content killed it. Redditors and people in the steam comments call it deep; I call it braggadocious. The writer is well-read, but the story is ultimately a fairly basic one that can't resist saying "look, look! Did you notice that setup?" instead of letting you figure it out.

But I do recommend it because it dedicates an entire little section to Nassim Nicholas Taleb for some fucking reason

 

[Vapewizard]

It has endless imitators which are all complete and utter shit, so don't bother a lick with any of those - and if you'd had an experience with one, don't let it mar the guys who did it first and did it better.

Damn, you weren't kidding. Humble bundle's new fall bundle has a game in it called Coffee talk and they're not even being subtle about it.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

Damn, you weren't kidding. Humble bundle's new fall bundle has a game in it called Coffee talk and they're not even being subtle about it.

View attachment 1734457

Coffeetalk is the worst offender, but there's... also Red Strings Club. Red Strings Club gets a little bit more leverage because it's fundamentally just telling a dumb and generic cyberpunk story about EVIL MEGACORPORATIONS and GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACIES and OPPRESSION EVERYWHERE and blah blah blah, but it uses those as setpieces. It also moralizes MUUUUUCH less than does Coffee Talk, and its moralization is simply insultingly banal. Whereas in coffee talk...

It repeats what Bright did. You know, the movie that ENDED RACISM by comparing black people to orcs? Take that, throw in some shadowrun, imagine the MOST GENERIC sad sap stories that a fucking bourgie hipster would think "really happens" in the world out there, and you've got the contrivance which is Coffee Talk. In both cases the music and visuals are fine, but ffs you can SMELL the daddy issues in the writing.

VA-11 HALL-A by contrast tells such a down to earth, comfy, simple story. And the protagonist is a lesbian! Someone, uh, forgot to inform the other games' writers that generally speaking, SCREAMING "WE'RE HERE AND WE'RE QUEER" does not a good character make. A futuristic slice-of-life with a lot of nods and charm shouldn't be dragged down by these pretenders stringing up stereotypes behind tropes whose main goal is to convey the moral superiority of the author. The comedy, too, is that the VA-11 HALL-A group of weebs is from Venezuela by contrast to their excessively posh imitators. There's some comedy in that there are minor, subtle little allusions to the environment in which they made their game - but it's subtle, smart, not BANG BANG BANG WHACK WHACK WHACK. (There's also humor in seeing a bunch of soygolems describe venezuela as this desolate, desperate country when it was once the cream of the latin american crop - no thanks to their holy benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat, but that's wholly unrelated to the devs.)

 

[Jimmy Durante's Ballsack]

None of these are Monster Girl Quest 1 or 2 (half way through before it gets weird) or Sengoku Rance.

Kill yourselves and feel ashamed.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Coffeetalk is the worst offender, but there's... also Red Strings Club. Red Strings Club gets a little bit more leverage because it's fundamentally just telling a dumb and generic cyberpunk story about EVIL MEGACORPORATIONS and GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACIES and OPPRESSION EVERYWHERE and blah blah blah, but it uses those as setpieces. It also moralizes MUUUUUCH less than does Coffee Talk, and its moralization is simply insultingly banal. Whereas in coffee talk...

It repeats what Bright did. You know, the movie that ENDED RACISM by comparing black people to orcs? Take that, throw in some shadowrun, imagine the MOST GENERIC sad sap stories that a fucking bourgie hipster would think "really happens" in the world out there, and you've got the contrivance which is Coffee Talk. In both cases the music and visuals are fine, but ffs you can SMELL the daddy issues in the writing.

VA-11 HALL-A by contrast tells such a down to earth, comfy, simple story. And the protagonist is a lesbian! Someone, uh, forgot to inform the other games' writers that generally speaking, SCREAMING "WE'RE HERE AND WE'RE QUEER" does not a good character make. A futuristic slice-of-life with a lot of nods and charm shouldn't be dragged down by these pretenders stringing up stereotypes behind tropes whose main goal is to convey the moral superiority of the author. The comedy, too, is that the VA-11 HALL-A group of weebs is from Venezuela by contrast to their excessively posh imitators. There's some comedy in that there are minor, subtle little allusions to the environment in which they made their game - but it's subtle, smart, not BANG BANG BANG WHACK WHACK WHACK. (There's also humor in seeing a bunch of soygolems describe venezuela as this desolate, desperate country when it was once the cream of the latin american crop - no thanks to their holy benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat, but that's wholly unrelated to the devs.)

To be honest I didn't enjoy VA-11 HALL-A, but it's probably I expected the plot to focus more on what's happening in the city rather than the protagonist's own personal past. It did kinda overdid the sex talk with talking about the protagonist interesting choice of masturbatory tools and the loli-bot.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

To be honest I didn't enjoy VA-11 HALL-A, but it's probably I expected the plot to focus more on what's happening in the city rather than the protagonist's own personal past. It did kinda overdid the sex talk with talking about the protagonist interesting choice of masturbatory tools and the loli-bot.

See, I prefer taking a human and personal story and placing it in the setting, giving the player only a real over-the-shoulder look in on the daily goings-on. That particular brand of storytelling seems to me like what the medium's really best at - but it doesn't help that I rank cyberpunk alongside forgotten-realms-fantasy as one of the least creative and most incestuously derivative settings. Maybe CDProjekt proves me wrong, but I can't say CORPORATIONS ARE STEALING ALL OUR DATA AND MORE POWERFUL THAN GOVERNMENTS and WE'RE TRANSCENDING HUMANITY WHOOAAHHHHHH tend to have much depth. They can make for a swanky backdrop, though.

As far as Dorothy, she's a fucking annoying character. So is the streamer girl. But they're at least meant to be, and there's no actual tiddies and sex scenes. It comes off as authentically the way that autistic weebs with more sex drive than sense talk to one another, though the story overall would be much improved with both of their utter and total removals. Really, the story has a lot of weird one-ofs and developments that go no-where and scenes that don't really serve a point. I just sortof enjoy that pseudorealism.

Really, I mostly jerk the game off for being exceedingly competent in a genre that's mostly complete shit and piss souffle. AA3 is really the only VN that comes to my mind which I would call incredibly stellar and near 100% perfect. Well, and the sountrack/art. Those things are sweet.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

So I finished a new VN - Raging Loop. The plot in it is that we play as a guy stumbling into a village that has a religeous ritual that's basically a real world mafia/Among Us, complete with special powers for the killers and some of the regular folks. The main character quickly dies, but discovers every time he dies he gets sent back to before he reached the village, with some of his memories intact. Overall it's a good VN that has a extremely good character writing and great interactions with the mind games being played. But it suffers from playing with its rules too loosely, that's very apperant by the time it needs to explain every plot thread.
For slightly more spoiler explanation (but not revealing anything outright):
The game seems to firmly establish how everything is magical in nature (using the religeous ritual as a set of laws), only to switch out and then explain how it could have been done by conventional mean. The problem is that the game only goes halfway, there are still plenty of plot threads (especially the reseting after death) that are 100% magical, and leaves a lot of plot holes that could only really work with magic. Not to mention it makes you question how the fuck the main character didn't encounter any clue once he goes "fuck that shit" and just experiments with his resets. This kinda makes the conclusion feel like a cop out where the writers patched what they could and ignored everything else.
Besides that, the game also really lacks in CGs. Not necessarily for the gory parts (which would have been pretty cool), but just points of character interaction. Plus a map and character list would have been pretty helpful.
Overall, I highly recommend.

 

[Namesarehardtocomeupwith]

Nekopara vol 4 is about to be released and the artist revealed on twitter that despite mating with all his pets like a maniac, the protagonist still refuse to fuck his sister like the fans demand him to since volume 1.
Why even live.

 

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

Who is he even fucking then? He fucked all of the girls in the previous games already.

 

[Namesarehardtocomeupwith]

Who is he even fucking then? He fucked all of the girls in the previous games already.

New cat girl introduced.

 

[Vapewizard]

Well, this is not a context I had expected to see Slowbeef mentioned in.

For those who don't know, Dramatical murder is the homo game where in the final route MC is fucked by an anthro version of his robot dog inside of his mindscape but the robot dog's consciousness was actually one of MC's split personalities that jumped out of his actual body to inhabit the robot dog, and the split-off personality anthro robot dog later ends up inhabiting the body of MC's long lost twin brother so they can fuck IRL too.

 

[GenociderSyo]

For those who don't know, Dramatical murder is the homo game where in the final route MC is fucked by an anthro version of his robot dog inside of his mindscape but the robot dog's consciousness was actually one of MC's split personalities that jumped out of his actual body to inhabit the robot dog, and the split-off personality anthro robot dog later ends up inhabiting the body of MC's long lost twin brother so they can fuck IRL too.

It's sad, but I'm no longer surprised by what happens in new visual novels anymore....

 

[Maurice Caine]

Know anything that resembles Hotel Dusk/Kyle Hyde in general? Yeah, got around playing the sequel but I want more of these interactive VNs, Cing can't be the single dev that thought to do that, right?

 

[Vapewizard]

It's been 3000 years.

 

[Namesarehardtocomeupwith]

20 years since the original, 12 years since the remake announcement.
What a crazy way to end 2020 you son of bitches.
Aoko best girl don't @ me.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

0% chance Sony lets them keep the fucking weird segue scene where a succubus takes the form of your crush to suck your dick. 0/10

 

[HexFag]

I finished Umineko and Ciconia like 4 months ago and I'm finally posting about it now lol.

If you want the TL;DR, I like them both and I regret not reading Higurashi's VN instead of the anime.

Spoiler: Umineko Spoilers

This shit was good as fuck. I don't read VN's like this very often, but I was hooked the whole way through and I finished this in 2 months. I read this with the 07th mod and the voice acting from the PS3 port made this experience so much more enjoyable for me. The only couple of gripes I had with the story would be parts of Episode 1 being relatively slow in comparison to everything else.

If I had to rate the episodes in any particular order, it'd probably go something like: 3 > 6 > 5 > 2 > 7 > 1 > 8 > 4

Episodes 3 and 6 are tied for me for having some of the best moments and the best songs in the 25/10 OST. The logic error and the scenes right after that were so damn entertaining that I think I just read those parts for the entirety of one day, you couldn't get me to stop reading it. The endings of both of these parts are so memorable that I still get chills just thinking about it. They are also the two episodes that I managed to get the most information from as a whole. Episode 3 humanizing Beatrice was very sweet, but I saw her tricking Battler from miles away. I wasn't expecing Virgilia to be in on it too, that hurt. I managed to figure out who Beatrice really was by the end of Episode 6 and I at least knew the basics behind the epitaph riddle by Episode 3. Stand out tracks from Episode 6 and 3 would be Rhythm-changer, Miragecoordinator, ACTIVE PAIN, and birth of a new witch.

Episodes 5 and 2 were also both amazing episodes but aren't nearly as good as the top two. Episode 5 introduces one of the best characters, Dlanor, and has some of the best logic battles in Chiru. I will never not find it funny that right after Battler "jumped out" of the window, everyone in the family just went "yeah Kinzo would totally do that". The court scene as also another amazing logic battle that had me on the edge of my seat. It also brings be joy to see Erika getting BTFO over the smallest things. Episode 2 was a banger simply for the fact that Beatrice and Battler get to interact as much as they do. These two have enough charisma by themselves, but together they're so much fun to listen to. It was very fun to see Battler crying and making the most retarded theories on how to escape a closed room while Beato cackles and calls him incompetent. I wouldn't be sad if the rest of Umineko was just Beato shitting on Battler while he cries about not being able to escape a closed room. Stand out tracks from these two episodes would be Kuina, Patchwork chimera, Occultics-witch, and of course, worldenddominator.

Episodes 7 and 1 were good but had the lofty task of explaining a fuckton of exposition in a short amount of time. Episode 1 had to introduce 18 characters, the epitaph, the lore behind Beatrice, and probably something else that I'm forgetting. For the most part, Episode 1 did a good job. It does meander in some parts while doing so but once it reached the family conference where the family members tried to extort money out of Krauss and he counters the fuck out of them, the story picks up and I was locked in from there. A scene I really liked was when Maria was just singing over all of the dead corpses and the fact that she couldn't explain what the fuck had just happened to her. I really did think that part was just magic and that Maria was in on it the whole time. Episode 7 not only explained who Beatrice really was, but Kinzo's backstory, the origins of the gold and why it was on Rokkenjima, why everyone died after 12:00, the story of Lion, and the "real" culprits on Rokkenjima Prime. The start of the Episode confirmed Shakanontrice for me but since Episode 2, I thought I was spoiled on George being the true culprit and that he was using them to carry out his murders because some Italian faggot kept spamming his gay ass manifesto and his crackpot theories on to /a/ with broken English, so it was a real shock to me when Kyrie and Rudolf savagely killed everyone in the gold room. I kinda saw it from Kyrie based on events from Episode 3 and 6, but Rudolf? He was so goofy that I couldn't expect the guy to do it. Stand out tracks would be Kiri no Pithos, End of the World, l&d circulation, System 0, Prison strip.

I don't hate Episodes 4 and 8, I just think that the pacing of the Ange sections bogged down the rest of Episode 4 as a whole. The shit with Maria and Rosa was extremely sad though and hearing the meaning of "Uu-Uu" made me cry. Episode 4 also made me realize the true meaning of magic and how it was used throughout the previous episodes as well as dropping the bombshell that Kinzo was dead all along, which I really should've picked up on much earlier. Episode 8 was a nice ending which left me satisfied with not just the story as a whole, but Ange's story arc as a character. If I'm being completely honest, I wasn't feeling Ange as a character, it was sad to see her getting bullied and humilated by her classmates, but it wasn't enough to justify all her edge to me. Episode 8 helped vindicate Ange for me. These two episodes are also the most magic-centric ones which I'm not as much of a fan of in comparison to the tense logic-battles. Krauss vs Goat-kun, Gaap vs George, and Jessica vs Ronove were cool as fuck though. I did think the scenes with Ange in the Magic ending for Episode 8 were very sweet and Tohya being Battler, which I saw from a mile away, still managed to get something out of me when he said he was no longer Battler anymore and he wanted to discard that personality. Also lol small bombs. Stand out tracks would be Revelations, Resurrected replayer, DisCode, and Victima propiciatoria.

I haven't read Saku, Hane, and Tsubasa since I'm waiting for the Switch/PS4 port to come out later this month so I can read it with voice acting.

Since there are probably some people who read Umineko while it was coming out 10 years ago, I have some questions to ask about the story when it was happening. I don't expect an answer:

Did any English speaking people manage to solve the riddle of the Epitaph? I know it requires a lot of Japanese wordplay, but was somebody autistic enough to put the clues together and learn Japanese?

What was the earliest somebody managed to solve the true identity of Beatrice? I've heard things about people solving it by Episode 3 but I'm not sure if they managed to put the pieces together by like Episode 2.

What were some of the craziest theories that some people on forums about the culprit or in general?

How was each episode recieved when they were initially released?

also ronove best boy

Spoiler: Ciconia Spoilers

I think I may like this introduction more than Legend of the Golden Witch.

The bulk of Phase 1 is dedicated towards worldbuilding and character interactions, and it does a damn good job at acclimating the reader to the new world. I have no clue if Ciconia is a mystery like Umineko, but I see no reason for them to go this in depth with the world unless certain elements are being used later throughout the story. Phase 1 mainly focuses on the AOU cast and I think they did a good job of developing them as a whole. I really hope that the other nations get more development as well. When the ending happened, it made the buildup well worth it and gave me a fuckton of questions that I have no answers for. Ciconia has a lot of potential and I'm really excited to see how it goes.

After listening to the fantastic soundtrack of Umineko, I felt kind of burnt listening to Ciconia's OST. The soundtrack isn't nearly as dynamic or impactful as Umineko's but I have hope that the later phases will pick up the slack and send me home with some bangers. Some notable tracks were Yain no Rinkaku, Ominous3, Apocalypsis Ciconia ll, and Sunya no sora.

As for theories, I don't have many that haven't been said by other schizos on the internet. The only ones I have are that Vier is Jesstress and the underground lab doesn't exist, Koshka is the Rika/Bern of Ciconia, and that the "Pandora" that the scientists are referring to is the ability to loop.

 

[Poop A Loop]

Utawarerumono: Prelude of the Fallen now has a steam page and it's coming out next week.

Good to hear since you can't really purchase Vita games without the actual system anymore and I don't think physical ps4 copies are being produced anymore. Games like Uta need to stick around.