The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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Ruldra
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by Ruldra »

Umineko now has a release date on Steam: July 8. Not only that, the entire question arc (ch. 1-4) will be released as one. Get hype!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/406550/
[Youtube | 1cc list | Steam]
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by Gespenst »

Looks like Key went on full force at localising their VNs
http://kazamatsuri.org/rewrite-and-ange ... alisation/
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by soprano1 »

Ruldra wrote:Umineko now has a release date on Steam: July 8. Not only that, the entire question arc (ch. 1-4) will be released as one. Get hype!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/406550/
Oh yeah, no more ham fisted people. :lol: :lol:
I assume it uses the Witch Hunt translation?
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by Ruldra »

Gespenst wrote:Looks like Key went on full force at localising their VNs
http://kazamatsuri.org/rewrite-and-ange ... alisation/
I read planetarian and part of Clannad. I don't really enjoy their work and have zero interest in reading anything else from them.
soprano1 wrote:I assume it uses the Witch Hunt translation?
From what I heard, they are taking the original WH translation and updating it.
[Youtube | 1cc list | Steam]
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by Ruldra »

And it's finally here: Umineko is now available on Steam!

For those who already read it (KAI), this announcement from a member of Witch Hunt might make you want to read it again:
The Witch Hunt translation of Umineko is solvable.

Considering all the time fans from across the world put into it, there's nothing I'd rather say. Unfortunately, I'd have to stretch the definition of solvable a bit to do so.

True, the puzzles as a whole can be answered with our first translation, but in Ryuukishi's own words, there are "treasure chests" hidden throughout the series for people paying attention. Many of these treasure chests end up being at least as important as the main story, and we ended up crushing several of them. A few were outright translation errors, though most probably couldn't have been translated without guessing an answer first.

The end result is that no one in the English community has ever experienced Umineko in full, except for a few lucky people with access to Japanese knowledge. Even the excellent manga renditions couldn't possibly have told Umineko in quite the same way as a Visual Novel. (Though this is not one of those manga adaptations that you're allowed to skip if you’re a fan of the original. Read them.)

To rectify this, the Witch Hunt has put in more hours this past year than any previous one in the history of our team. Building this Steam version involved editing more than 75% of the lines in the original translation (almost 90% in EP1) and well over 3,000 images for HD support. And that's even before the Mangagamer pass that included drastic improvements to every chapter. Nearly all of the text changes were to bring our paranoid, hyper-literal translation more in line with what we had in Rose Guns Days, getting the scenes to actually read well instead of worrying about every conceivable loophole that might be hiding a clue we didn't know about. Unfortunately, if nearly every line doesn't sound quite right, the chances of you noticing something that's supposed to sound strange are pretty darn small. Also, we've had some practice since then.

In the end though, what really matters are those scenes strewn throughout the series that will finally make sense, especially if you've never reread EP1-4. Umineko is a VN built to be read multiple times, and I guarantee you that using Steam as an excuse to try it again will turn it into an entirely different game.
[Youtube | 1cc list | Steam]
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by M.Knight »

I finished Chaos;Child a few days ago and wrote some detailed and spoiler-filled thoughts about the whole game here. Despite liking its predecessor Chaos;Head quite a bit, I thought this one was a lot more uneven. Some very great moments, but also plenty of boring crap that doesn't feel right for the murder mystery type of story it was supposed to be. On top of that, some of the C;H flaws were not actually fixed at all here. The main character wasn't bad but not as "extreme" and memorable as C;H's, so I was less forgiving of the story and the pacing issues.

Actually, I remember feeling the same way about S;G0. It was pretty hyped before it came out but in the end felt very haphazard and lacking the consistency and tightness of the original Steins;Gate. I wonder if the SciADV series isn't getting too popular and big for its own sake. Those sequels are clearly not up to par for me and I wouldn't be surprised if Chiyomaru and co' keep milking the franchise with those lower quality games that don't have the creative freedom the original novels had just because they can get away with it.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by BryanM »

ChäoS;HEAd always seems to have a fanbase that claims the game is better than the animation. The Chaos;Child animation actively caused me pain while watching it, and I had to give up. So many superfluous characters and threads just jammed together into too small a space.

One particular thing that broke my soul is when a character asked the question we've had for years while receiving an information dump from Exposition Lady: "How does having a shared perception of reality create a material impact on the real world? Even if everyone in the world believed that door was unlocked, that doesn't mean it should have been possible for me to open it, right?!" Expo Lady answers with a 'that's a very good question!' and then ignores it completely to continue providing exposition the author couldn't be bothered to plot and write out. Or the animation team didn't want to animate, I dunno which it was.

Was this whole thing handled better/differently in the VN?

That's one thing that really annoys me about this brand. That they don't have sound rules, let alone science. Even Steins;Gate gets really sketchy sometimes about the fact that they don't really have a time machine - they have a machine to transfer Rintarou's consciousness to parallel worlds.

Child;Head's idea of people sharing a delusion, which makes it real (for them) was really novel and cool. And has very dark and interesting implications: In one scene a girl falls from the school building, and The Hero injects a flower garden into reality to cushion her fall. It's played like it had a physical difference and that she's fine, but she shouldn't be. From then on, she should be dead and rotting on the ground because no one can see her corpse. (Even worse than that - if she was seriously injured but still able to be saved with medical care, no one would be able to see her.) And the version of her that's still alive, doing plucky things like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide? She's a delusion.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by M.Knight »

The visual novel is better than the anime because 12 episodes are not enough to tell the game's story without feeling rushed or cramped. Funnily enough, one episode has a pre-emptive fight against a bad guy. Such fight wasn't there in the original VN at all and doesn't add anything to the plot. That's right, they added filler to an anime that needed to be really careful with how it spends its already pretty short available screentime. :lol:

Another reason the VN is preferable is that you spend more time following Takumi's lonely lifestyle and delusional rants. The pacing is thus a bit slower but IMO it's for the better as those moments were my favorite in the game. I actually despise the way the VN community seems to be okay with having their non-slice-of-life VNs filled with absolutely pointless, boring and generic slice-of-life and highschool scenes for the pretense of "immersion" even though it actually destroys any engagement you could have with it. FSN is a major offender of it for example (to the point that I found the game to be basically unreadable without the fast-forward key), and Chaos;Child also has this. However, in Chaos;Head's case, I have always been more interested in seeing Takumi's hikki and paranoid tendancies play out rather than solve the mystery. The murders going on are still useful as they are an interesting way to push his character out of his comfort zone, but the main appeal for me was the MC's messed up life.

Also, the fantranslated VN is not actually the final and definite version of the game, as there's Chaos;Head Noah, an updated version with character routes and more content in general. It is not translated yet, but I can't see it being inferior to the current VN, let alone the anime.

In any case, that doesn't mean the VN solves the issues the anime had, because many of the shaky and unconvincing pseudoscience elements originate from the VN in the first place. And the game also feels a bit unfocused at times when it tries to give backstory for all the girls even though they are ultimately not very important.

I don't recall exactly how that exposition scene goes on in the VN, but I don't remember any convincing explanation for how delusions are "real-booted". From what I recall, it was said that real booting was done thanks to the Gigalomaniacs' abilities combined with the Di-Swords, and there may or may not have been a mention of a Dirac sea or something, but honestly it's just a bunch of chuuni nonsense.

In Steins;Gate, I tought the science was handled much better and the fact that they don't really have a full-fledged time machine didn't feel like a problem at all to me. While I haven't put the story under intense scrutiny, I never felt the way things worked didn't make any sense, as it always seemed rather consistent and believable when I played the game.
BryanM wrote: Child;Head's idea of people sharing a delusion, which makes it real (for them) was really novel and cool. And has very dark and interesting implications: In one scene a girl falls from the school building, and The Hero injects a flower garden into reality to cushion her fall. It's played like it had a physical difference and that she's fine, but she shouldn't be. From then on, she should be dead and rotting on the ground because no one can see her corpse. (Even worse than that - if she was seriously injured but still able to be saved with medical care, no one would be able to see her.) And the version of her that's still alive, doing plucky things like converting oxygen into carbon dioxide? She's a delusion.
Yeah, the concept of shared delusions could have worked pretty well with the MC whose mental health and grip on reality and already pretty loose in the first place, and were those never made physical and tangible, we could have some interesting mindscrews here and there.

I never thought of such an interpretation for the rooftop scene, and it's actually a fascinating and hilarous one! Unfortunately, if the rest of the SciADV games are anything to bo by, she's still alive and the flowerbed really made a difference.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by cj iwakura »

I never got to play Chaos;Head, but I started ;Child and it's really interesting so far.

Good rule of thumb: the VN is always better.


Also, 428 comes out in a couple days, can't wait.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by M.Knight »

I would like to hear your full impressions on Chaos;Child once you are done with it!
And, wow, I almost forgot about 428! Thanks for the reminder. Not sure I'll get it right away, but it's back on my radar now.

As for the VN always being better, I would say it's true for the most part but there might be some exceptions. I admit I haven't watched any of the FSN anime adaptations, but it's basically impossible for them to be worse than the VN given how around 80% of the text in it is useless filler. There are endless cooking/slice-of-life scenes that are there just to pad the wordcount and were probably removed in the adaptation as the anime that can't afford to waste its episodes like that. Even the action scenes are naturally going to be better in the anime thanks to more fluid animation, but it's not just that : the VN's narration is so repetitive and with zero variation in the fights' dynamic that the scenes end up just as boring as the rest of the game. I recall a fight scene in the middle of UBW where one character gets punched repeatedly for like 5 or 10 minutes with the exact same "animation" playing over and over again, without any counterattack or any other move that would give some flavor to the battle.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by cj iwakura »

M.Knight wrote:I would like to hear your full impressions on Chaos;Child once you are done with it!
And, wow, I almost forgot about 428! Thanks for the reminder. Not sure I'll get it right away, but it's back on my radar now.

As for the VN always being better, I would say it's true for the most part but there might be some exceptions. I admit I haven't watched any of the FSN anime adaptations, but it's basically impossible for them to be worse than the VN given how around 80% of the text in it is useless filler. There are endless cooking/slice-of-life scenes that are there just to pad the wordcount and were probably removed in the adaptation as the anime that can't afford to waste its episodes like that. Even the action scenes are naturally going to be better in the anime thanks to more fluid animation, but it's not just that : the VN's narration is so repetitive and with zero variation in the fights' dynamic that the scenes end up just as boring as the rest of the game. I recall a fight scene in the middle of UBW where one character gets punched repeatedly for like 5 or 10 minutes with the exact same "animation" playing over and over again, without any counterattack or any other move that would give some flavor to the battle.
That's a damn good point. UBW's anime is much tighter than the VN(or Unlimited Cooking Works as I call it). But it's an exception, I think.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by BryanM »

I actually despise the way the VN community seems to be okay with having their non-slice-of-life VNs filled with absolutely pointless, boring and generic slice-of-life and highschool scenes for the pretense of "immersion" even though it actually destroys any engagement you could have with it.
Argh, agreed. I understand the appeal of an idealized school life that the real world could never provide, but make that stuff interesting at least. Pointless smalltalk ruins stuff like Summon Night imo.

There's this novel called Blindsight which has these Aliens in it who interpret non-meaningful communication as an attack, as it costs energy to process what was said and if nothing was gained it must be meant to deplete resources! That stuff always makes me feel like those aliens.

I'm not asking for much, just have a character give an opinion about something at least. That's hacky soap writing trope 101, the Opinion Gauntlet.
And the game also feels a bit unfocused at times when it tries to give backstory for all the girls even though they are ultimately not very important.
They really are just there to sell this shit, like the booth models at E3 or the lady on a car magazine. And that's just lazier than lazy. Think how much better it'd have been if the Starter Pokémon really was the serial killer, or at least enjoyed lightly stabbing people.

Supporting characters 'ought to support. To quote To Be a Power in the Shadows!:

"Word choice is of course important, but there is also articulation, pitch change, and vibrato, to list only a few. After the whole night of research, I have attained the ultimate mob-like confession, and am now standing at the decisive battle.

Battle.

Exactly. For a mob character, this is nothing short of a great battle.

Power in shadows have power in shadows battles to fight, while mob characters have mob battles to fight.

And thus I, at this moment, as a mob character, must give it my very best."

In Steins;Gate, I tought the science was handled much better and the fact that they don't really have a full-fledged time machine didn't feel like a problem at all to me. While I haven't put the story under intense scrutiny, I never felt the way things worked didn't make any sense, as it always seemed rather consistent and believable when I played the game.
The things that ignored are ignored to smooth things out, and the things that are clearly the author bullshiting us are forgivable. 'cause he's not trying to pull one over on us or take a shortcut: A person's gender getting changed by a text message is blatantly impossible, but we easily forgive it because it's such a massive and hilarious subversion of our expectations. TV+Microwave = time travel, just go with it man. The only place it seriously breaks down for me is whenever it appears someone "phases out" of existence.

It definitely helps maintain the illusion that all the stuff isn't an excuse to give everyone super saiyan powers to end everything in one final fist fight with the Big Bad.
M.Knight wrote:Such fight wasn't there in the original VN at all and doesn't add anything to the plot. That's right, they added filler to an anime that needed to be really careful with how it spends its already pretty short available screentime. :lol:
lol, of course.

The record for too much ham crammed into too small of a can I've seen so far is the last episode of Demon King Daimao. It appears they got the cancellation notice right before they started work on the final episode. And they just crammed like 5 years worth of light novels into one episode. Storylines that would take multiple episodes, whiz by in quickly spoken sentences. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.

... and I've seen Endless Eight.

Also I read Cuilan's thread about his uh, hobbies.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

I'm toying with adapting the table top rpg campaign I'm in into a visual novel / action rpg hybrid.

The GM is a masterful writer and storyteller, and it's all been wonderful. Would work well as an rpg / vn, with just a little rewriting of the replay of the campaign I think.

Talkie talkie -> combat, repeat is how the game actually goes (though admittedly, late game there's far more talk/exploration and far less combat, though what's here is extra climactic). Trails in The Sky had a similar groove and it was a fantastic experience.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by M.Knight »

Squire : Mixing dialogue heavy sequences with game parts is a tricky thing to do, I think. If either part falters, half of the game directly suffers for it. And even then, sometimes as a player you just want to focus on the part that's better executed or just resonates with you more. Just like we usually don't like dialogue sequences in our shmups for example, or at least don't listen to/read them on repeated playthroughs.

I am near the end of Trails in the Sky FC and I never found the combat to be remotely interesting whereas the dialogue and character interactions are super fun. I wouldn't be surprised if the game worked better if there wasn't any battle system at all, and just light exploration and narrative. I hated the way you had to equip specific quartz in the limited slots just so your characters can actually hit enemies with their regular attacks instead of missing like half of the time if not more, and most of the end game can be cheesed with Earth Wall and the confusion spell. In contrast, I love how natural the dialogue sounds and how "un-JRPG", or even how "un-Japanese" it is. Estelle and co' sound like real people and not a playwright's puppets with speeches about vague values and morals that no actual human being says. I also wonder if Olivier's way of speaking is not intended to mock flowery language and purple prose in general because it's pretty hilarous and nobody takes him seriously.

There are some examples of games that can mix action and text of course. I personally liked Sakura Wars V a lot, as the entire presentation and the battles (though they could have been shorter) made you feel like actually playing an anime. I also have a lot of fun with both parts of the Project X Zone games, as the dialogue is mostly silly and funny, and the game mechanics never get old and are always fun to try to pull off despite being rather simple.

You gotta finish Aeon Zenith first though! :P
cj iwakura wrote:Unlimited Cooking Works
Haha, nice nickname! I call it Unlimited Bloated Works myself to stay true to the initials, but honestly both nicks fit the entire game.
It's definitely an exception, I agree. But as it's a very high profile one, I felt I had to mention it.


BryanM : My stance on slice-of-life is that if it hurts the pacing, if it doesn't give you any unique, interesting and plot-relevant insights into the characters or if doesn't match the tone of the rest of the novel, then it's useless. If it's funny I can be more receptive to it, but most of the time the "humor" in those scenes is super generic. Actually, the parts I enjoyed the most in Chaos;Head could be considered as slice-of-life, as you see Takumi locked up in his weird container room doing hikki/otaku stuff, or just being super paranoid. The reason it's relevant IMO is that such stuff directly defines who Takumi is, reinforces the feeling of loneliness that surrounds him, and is not something you've already seen in a million other VNs or animes.

And your point about having opinions is a good one, come to think of it. It is an easy way to give a character a bit more personality. I imagine that's one of the things that make the SciADV protags stand out a bit more than "self-inserts".

In any case, whether it is slice-of-life or the palette-swapped girls, I don't actually mind if they are in games where that's the focus. There are probably tons and tons of VN whose setups and plots are generic escapist fantasies with a perfect high school life and tons of moeblobs that are attracted to you for whatever reason and I am okay with their existence. They do their own thing, and are easy to spot and avoid. The only way you could make them disappear entirely would be to make real-life loneliness itself disappear anyway, which is basically impossible. What bothers me is when those elements find their way in more serious works. VNs that want to be plot-centric still have to include one girl of every color of the rainbow and slice-of-life segments for commercial reasons and that tarnishes plenty of games that could have been really great.

On a more positive note, I'll mention this very short and rather obscure comedy OELVN named RE:Prince of Nigeria. Discounting the (IMO unecessary) epilogue, it is only around 30 minutes long, but almost every single line had me bursting out laughing. The premise is also very stupid but the game completely rolls with it and that makes it really funny. It is the kind of ideal pacing and focus that I would like to see a lot more in this medium. In other words, more Saya no Utas and less FSNs please.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

M.Knight wrote:snip
Yup, Trails could theoretically be a love it or hate it based on the dichotomy between its story and gameplay, but there's something said for just going for something and not caring if you can't appeal to everyone. To paraphrase a Furi developer interview "You know what? Some people are going to fucking hate our game. And we're 100% okay with that."

Like, honestly, I love how there's no fucking skip or fast forward button for the dialogue...in a game that might be 70% dialogue. It takes guts to commit like that, especially for a company usually revered for its action gameplay. A bit of an eye opener, for all the theorycrafting out there, if it's fun it's fun.

It helps that I enjoy both the battles and writing though.
M.Knight wrote:In contrast, I love how natural the dialogue sounds and how "un-JRPG", or even how "un-Japanese" it is. Estelle and co' sound like real people and not a playwright's puppets with speeches about vague values and morals that no actual human being says. I also wonder if Olivier's way of speaking is not intended to mock flowery language and purple prose in general because it's pretty hilarous and nobody takes him seriously.
Yuuup, easily the best jrpg I've ever played in terms of script, characterization, and character development. So good that everything else in the genre, even relative darlings, just feels hollow in comparison. One of the reasons I switched to TRPG's, since they mostly do a better job of scratching that deep characterization itch while still being a fun adventure.
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Yup, I refuse to code anything else till that's finished.

Besides, the campaign isn't done yet ^_^
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Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by BryanM »

M.Knight wrote:Chaos;Head could be considered as slice-of-life, as you see Takumi locked up in his weird container room doing hikki/otaku stuff, or just being super paranoid. The reason it's relevant IMO is that such stuff directly defines who Takumi is, reinforces the feeling of loneliness that surrounds him, and is not something you've already seen in a million other VNs or animes.
I completely agree, flaws and actual hobbies are vastly more interesting than pre-molded protagonist mayonnaise. Big hits like Evangelion or Madoka, basically the entire cast is seriously screwed up.

A great example of a blown premise is NEET Receives a Dating System, where the protagonist transmigrates to a parallel world where he has a system like from a dating sim. The body he occupies was a gross antisocial fatty. He immediately gets not-fat, maxes his stats, works hard, and is super polite to everyone. And I guess it eventually becomes about leveling up combat levels and skills like a shonen battle anime protagonist, for some reason? It's horrible.

But if were about a true gross fatty asshole with all this abusable power in his hands (save-and-load alone turns any conventional narrative into beautiful road kill)? It'd be the greatest thing of all time.
VNs that want to be plot-centric still have to include one girl of every color of the rainbow and slice-of-life segments for commercial reasons and that tarnishes plenty of games that could have been really great.
I do wonder how much of that comes from the market and how much comes from the suits that greenlight projects not being remotely part of their customer base. SEGA's Phantasy Star Idola thing, an inferior Fate Grand Order game no one wants or needs, created as what some MBA in a suit imagines nerds like... I think that sort of thing happens more often than not in most forms of media. At least to some degree.

The toned down version of the aspects you're talking about aren't bad: Having some female characters is generally an improvement as long as they're written as humans and not pets. Slice of life is just downtime, which helps manage stress and tension levels.

Steins;gate is a literal wish fulfillment harem series at its core, but it's not gross about it.
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by M.Knight »

Yeah I don't get why characters losing their flaws and becoming perfect nice guys is supposed to be seen as character development when it actually makes them much less interesting and human. It's not just in VNs, but I guess some JRPGs are guilty of this too, like Tales of the Abyss. As for isekais, I don't even get what's the point (other than boring escapism) if the MC does not retain his jerkass traits even in the other world. That's why Konosuba was so funny to me and why I probably won't care about the huge majority of that genre.

I think the responsability for generic pandering stuff (high school slice of life, harem cast) is shared by both groups. While there are plenty of cases where it's money-hungry execs shoehorning those elements, that kind of decision wouldn't have been possible in the first place if there wasn't an audience that likes that crap and is potential money. VNs in particular seem to have historically associated with romance if not outright ero-stuff, so I imagine there's plenty of otakus who are always looking forward to it.

I agree that a well written cast can work even if it has lots of girls in it, just like in Steins;Gate where the group dynamic was rather convincing and fun to watch. I still prefer when stories have a more personal focus, and explore one or two characters instead of having a bigger cast where not everyone can be as developed and strong. In addition, the first-person perspective is also something I tend to appreciate a lot. S;G0 has a bunch of flaws and one of them for example is that it changes perspectives a lot, which doesn't work as well as the original always being from Okabe's perspective. That's also why I ended up liking C;H's protag as much, because you often get into his twisted mind. It has been a long while since I read it, but I also remember enjoying Rin's route in Katawa Shoujo more than the rest of the game because there isn't that much of a focus on romance and the route is more of the character study of a very peculiar person.
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BryanM
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Re: The Visual Novels Discussion/Recommendation Thread

Post by BryanM »

That's just the nature of the human animal. Those "romance" novels marketed to women, Conan the Barbarian pulp fiction and so on aren't all that different. Empty entertainment is all some form of pornography in the end. If you try to give a boring lecture about your Youtube channel, everyone's going to ignore it and go watch the show with costumes and titties in it instead.

The few Game-Isekai style novels out there that focus on having interesting game elements read a lot like a Let's Play of an imaginary game that doesn't exist. Writing pieces of one is not a bad angle to approach game design from, either.

Probably my favorite of the genre that isn't a Korean grimdark survival novel, would be Only I Know The World Is A Game. The author wrote it as a love letter to the nonsensical stuff games have players do (and of course, to kusoge as a whole) - stuff like climbing up and down the same tree hundreds of times to build up your STR stat, hiring someone at the guild -> sell off their stuff -> remove hired character -> repeat, that kind of stuff. It's inherently comical.

An excerpt about the karmic balance of party member quality:
Spoiler
Mmm, I inadvertently let out a hum.

Was it just my imagination that character strengths seemed to be inversely correlated to their normalcy? After all, the surprising lack of decent characters was enough to make me accept playing solo.

(Inverse to their power… Now that I think about it…)

Going just by power, I should probably also consider “The Strongest Genius Idiot Magician Sazaan”.

Well… I’ll only consider it.

You might have imagined it just from hearing his name, but there were rumors that “your survival chance decreases by half” or “your death chance increases by 500%” just by adding this character to your party. He was the strongest character in a negative sense, suited only for the most masochistic of players.

Still, looking at specs alone, Sazaan could be said to be one of the strongest magician-type characters.

After all, his ability values and spell power were high. Stupidly high. But that was also what resulted in his many victims.

There were innumerable complaints about him. To begin with, Nekomimineko AIs were already not what one would call great, but Sazaan was another two levels beyond that. His AI, polished in a bad sense by what could only be called an agglomeration of the producers’ ill will, had caused many players to rediscover what rage felt like.

The least of the problems was him casting Concentrate, boosting the power of the next spell by 100%, before casting magic that has a high chance of inflicting status effects. Also,, he prioritizes waking up sleeping monsters with weak offensive spells for some reason; constantly tries to use spells that would inflict status effects on monsters with low magic defense for some reason; likes using Berzerk mainly on physical type enemies for some reason, which made them stronger instead; he sometimes yells out, “th-the seal in my right hand is…!” and acts as if he was trying to suppress his right hand from going berserk; and just when you think that he’s just looking for attention his right hand’s seal actually breaks and annihilates the party; or trying to use explosive magic to protect himself when monsters get too close, but killing himself in the process; wearing a weird mask; firing spells indiscriminately when he starts panicking; clicking his tongue at you when you try to heal him; constantly using AOE fire magic when there are more than two enemies, even if it would hit allies; using fire magic even against fire-type monsters and healing them instead; trying to use fire magic even when underwater and failing; using fire magic even in a forest and causing a large forest fire; yet when he actually encounters a monster weak to fire, he starts using wind magic, which he wasn’t even good at; randomly laughing out of nowhere, and when asked about it, just saying, “Sorry, I just remembered something funny”; thoughtlessly setting his magic to go as far as it can and aggroing distant or strong enemies and changing the tides of battle; being unpunctual; casually attacking monsters that were countering and being hit by the counterattack; always talking about probabilities; starting to talk about his past life without being prompted when doing nothing and entering idle mode, with the details changing every time, and the details weren’t even consistent; always using the highest-levelled spell regardless of the enemy’s level resulting in the overkill of not just the enemy but even the enemy’s item drops that had HP; always using the highest-levelled spell regardless of the enemy’s level resulting in the spell not being casted even after the fight was over, and, even after the fight was over, he would still continue casting his spell thus delaying the whole party, sometimes messing up the cast location which causes the offensive spell that eventually gets casted after the fight to end up killing an ally, his spell’s effects drawing new enemies; he always used the highest-levelled spell regardless of the enemy’s level, resulting in him running out of MP during critical junctures; he charged straight at the enemy after running out of MP even though he was only wearing cloth armor and would be killed immediately; he immediately blamed others for his failures; his congratulatory words were condescending; his victory pose was annoying; he had bad table manners; I don’t like how he saves his favorites for last; he would come dressed in hard to move clothing when going hiking; he complained when bitten by bugs; he always wanted to take a break; I had to piggyback him down the mountain in the end; he became unrestrained after drinking; he’s always drunk even when not drinking; he can’t talk while looking people in the eye, blaming this on his mask; somehow just remembering his name made me irritated; he caused the world to have more cases of stiff shoulders and aching backs; he caused global warming; but, even so, one of the strongest spells, “Stardust Flare” could only be obtained from one of his events so I had to have him in my party at least once; so, he really, really was the worst person ever.

You might think I’m making it up, but this was all true. As proof of that, I’m really irritated for some reason, and even though I didn’t have stiff shoulders or an aching back, I felt like I did.
It's a bit of a pity that it'll never be a blockbuster hit, since the art style of the franchise isn't up there with Berserk or Goblin Slayer. No extreme sex or violence, no cute fluffy animals, no one cares. To a hobbyist niche audience it goes.

(Another oddity of the genre is there isn't a big Pokémonish style isekai franchise out there. That makes absolutely zero sense to me, and is testament to how poorly the genre has been explored. There's a giant pile of money just sitting there, and no one is bothering to pick it up, are they?)
I still prefer when stories have a more personal focus, and explore one or two characters instead of having a bigger cast where not everyone can be as developed and strong.
Yep, character rotation is a very core technique that you see all the time. Besides not overwhelming the reader with ten thousand different pokemon that don't matter, besides giving everyone a chance to be a protagonist, it keeps things from becoming stale:

Okabe gets pushed around by events and other people to the point where he's rarely the actual actor in a scene - in a very real sense the other characters aren't there to support him, he's there to support them. Authors who write stories with cypher characters with that philosophy tend do pretty well, in my estimation. (Worked for the cast of Ghostbusters..)

And of course, Asuka joins Evangelion just in time to bring some sunshine before the oppressive bleakness of oblivion swallows the entire thing.
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