Current Events > Visual Novel General v3 "The toaster oven is a sacred treasure"

(+) Yeah! (+)

Chronofan8 posted...

Which visuales novel has the sexy?

Pretty much most of them. If you threw a dart at a Visual Novel dart board chances are the Visual Novel you land on has the sexy. It seems way harder to find Visual Novels without the sexy.

We need more VNs without the sexy.

As far as narrative is concerned, the fact characters have sex is probably far more relevant than the actual sex itself, where plot just grinds to a halt, replaced by hilariously descriptive dialogue about what's going on. As a result, I'm usually not too bothered by all-ages versions of games assuming they're done correctly instead of something like If My Heart Had Wings.
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That sums up my thoughts pretty well. It can pretty much always be summed up with "They had sex." It just gets weird when it spends an hour describing every little detail about what they're doing and I'm just sitting here thinking " I really didn't need to know."

Popcorn_Fairy posted...

Pretty much most of them. If you threw a dart at a Visual Novel dart board chances are the Visual Novel you land on has the sexy. It seems way harder to find Visual Novels without the sexy.

read symphonic rain
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kirbymuncher posted...

read symphonic rain

What's it about?

it's a romance story about some depressed guy trying to find a partner for his mandatory end of school music recital and worrying about how that will affect his relationship with his long-distance girlfriend who he writes weekly letters to.

Or something like that, that description really doesn't do it justice but I dunno for sure how else to describe it. Its strengths imo are its overall atmosphere (you can really feel the gloominess of the protagonist in like, everything that happens) and its multi-layered characters (basically everyone has more beneath the surface than you'd think).

If you're looking for action, comedy, something really fast paced, or something cheery then I would not recommend since it's very much none of those at all.
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kirbymuncher posted...

about some depressed guy

kirbymuncher posted...

Its strengths imo are its overall atmosphere (you can really feel the gloominess of the protagonist in like, everything that happens)

Well, I'm sold. Gonna have to look into this one.

ArthasReborn posted...

Still holding out hope they translate the New Game VN
I need my Hifumi

That would be great
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Yeah I was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall so even if I was Russian I wouldn't understand that feeling >_>
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The STALKER games were kind of rough. I think the studio made it on a shoestring budget or something but it was a pretty ambitious project. I liked it but never ended up finishing any of them.

Did you start Everlasting Summer? No idea if it's worth it to patch the sex scenes into the game.
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STALKER is one of my favorite games of all time. It's so amazing.

Itachi157 posted...

No I haven't started it, did you? I'm on the very verge of finishing the last side story in Himawari so trying to get that done. I might still start it tonight though. I probably wouldn't bother with the patch.

It's actually pretty low on my list right now because kirbymuncher got me so ready to start on Symphonic Rain and you got me wanting to play Himawari as well. All of this is installed and just waiting for me to finish Tomoyo After which I swear I've been reading like 20 lines per week or something so I'm taking forever.

Popcorn_Fairy posted...

STALKER is one of my favorite games of all time. It's so amazing.

My first impression was how unforgiving it was because things could kill you really quickly. I did like the atmosphere so much i bought that Russian Stalker movie that inspired parts of the game and my sister got me Roadside Picnic for my birthday one year.
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Is Fate/Hollow Ataraxia any good? Is it like the sequel to Fate/Stay Night? Looking at the screenshots I'm not sure if it's canon or not
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f/ha is very weird. The setup seems perfectly designed for slice of life comedy featuring all the characters, which it does have, but there's also a rather serious plot that apparently gets extremely good later in the story.

You choose which scenes to view from a little map movement thing and the game marks which ones advance the story, so if you want you could even ignore most of the SoL and just read all the plot. I never realized this when I was reading though so I didn't end up finishing, got sick of the comedy (which is really not that great outside of a few scenes) and dropped it.

You might want to give it a try if you liked fsn (and I mean actually read it, not just watched the anime, since there's no heaven's feel anime yet and stuff from that route is very important in places
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lol shit I'm having so much trouble with the rhythm game in Symphonic Rain because I don't type with home row and don't know which keys are where when I place my hands on the keyboard properly.
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from what I remember the music staff is pretty nicely arranged so that left side of keyboard is bottom of staff and right side is top. It's not perfect but it's pretty good. I really like the rhythm game since of all rhythm games I've played it feels most like you're actually playing the song (except maybe rock band drums)
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Yeah, from left to right is bottom to up on the bars. I just need to orient myself mentally to see the keyboard sideways and I should get used to it after a while. The biggest trouble is when I need to hit two keys at once.
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Steam's store page says Himawari has cloud saving, so you might still be okay if your hard drive goes kaput. Hope it won't though; my drive died during an Overwatch comp game once and it was just a massive pain in the ass to deal with.
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Oh boy kirbymuncher wasn't kidding when he said Symphonic Rain had a good soundtrack. I like how the Steam page also has that as one of the tags.

I think I'm getting better at the rhythm game bit by bit and it definitely is very satisfying when you get a good combo going.
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oh also I don't remember if I ever mentioned this but there are more routes that unlock after reading the initial 3 heroine routes and torta's route leads into them the best, so I recommend reading it last. Unless you're going to read it over a fairly short period of time and/or have a good memory for details
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I usually go blind my first run, so I actually have no idea which route I'll end up on. I'll probably take a while to go through it so if I don't end up on Torta's route I'll keep it in mind to leave it for last.

What are even the logistics of a city that experiences endless rain
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It was storming pretty hard earlier today and I was just sitting there listening to the rain hit the window.

Itachi157 posted...

If there was a city with endless dusk/night I'd definitely want to live there though

Have you ever played Tales of Xillia? It starts in Fennmont, which is basically a city of perpetual night. I think it gives off a pleasant atmosphere.
http://operationrainfall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Tales-of-Xillia-Screenshot-7.jpg
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The only Tales game I've played is Berseria. And I've only played about half of it. After the rest any good? Are they as dark as Berseria?

Of the ones I've played, which is mostly Abyss onward, Berseria is probably the darkest. Vesperia has a vigilante protagonist that outright kills those he deems to escape the law's reach, though. They all have their dramatic moments but Berseria is the only one where almost the entire cast are shamelessly amoral about their goals.

Itachi157 posted...

I did play it, and that's what I had in mind when I said that. I need to catch up on the series. I still need to play Xillia 2, Zestiria and Berseria. Xillia 1 was the last one I beat.

I know you've probably heard this a lot but don't expect much from Zestiria <_< It started off decent enough to me but then eventually you need to mess around with the equipment system and that was no fun at all. It does, however, have Zaveid who probably has my favourite music in all the Tales games I've played.
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Oh, yeah, the Steam reviews for Himawari said as much. They were like "It's chock-full of anime cliches including amnesia at the start, but then it gets really good after the common route."
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Need some help recognizing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv1_u6X7i2c
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GiftedACIII posted...

Need some help recognizing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv1_u6X7i2c

melty moment
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kirbymuncher posted...

GiftedACIII posted...

Need some help recognizing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv1_u6X7i2c

melty moment

lol thanks. Do you know anything about it? Looked it up and it seems to be really obscure
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you might not realize when looking at VNs available in english because comparatively not many of them get translated and it messes up the ratios, but there are a ridiculous amount of very generic school romance VNs that are very rarely worth reading. This... looks like one of those. I can't say for sure but the fact that it has 5 writers who for the most part have never worked on anything particularly notable is not a very good sign. Also I've never heard anyone talk about it which means there's probably not that much to it beyond what it looks like on the surface

I'd actually never heard of it before, I found it by looking up character names from the video <_<
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I spent ten minutes trying to Google-Fu it but a lack of Japanese knowledge hampered my efforts. Searching Takuto merely yielded some random BL VNs >_>
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ArthasReborn posted...

I spent ten minutes trying to Google-Fu it but a lack of Japanese knowledge hampered my efforts. Searching Takuto merely yielded some random BL VNs >_>

use vndb's character search
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Huh, that's really handy. I'd have found it in less than a minute if I went through the few results that come up.
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I keep thinking Farrah Fawcett when Falcita Fawcett is mentioned.
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I think I'm on track for Fal's route in Symphonic Rain. It was practicing with her and visiting her at her restaurant for some lasagna, which actually made my stomach growl in real life. In other routes, do characters still have a big role? Because I'd be disappointed if Torta didn't really show up at all since she has my favourite character theme in the game.

Also, is Torta totally trying to steal Chris from Arie?

Chris as a character feels kind of wishy-washy, very unambitious. There's a sense of being perfectly content with where he is but also the knowledge that it can't stay that way forever.
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ArthasReborn posted...

In other routes, do characters still have a big role?

Not really. They'll show up here and there but in general the routes are pretty focused on the main girl of the route. Well, phorni's always around and there's the letters from ari but I dunno if you want to count those.

ArthasReborn posted...

Chris as a character feels kind of wishy-washy, very unambitious.

Rereading symphonic rain after having read a bunch of other VNs made me realize just how cool he is as a protagonist, even if he gets extremely annoying at times. It's pretty common for VNs to have these sorts of no personality blank slate lazy do-nothing protagonists... but chris somehow turns his wishy-washyness and willingness to just go along with whatever happens into a personality itself. In anything else he'd be like some boring self insert but here he somehow just isn't
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That's true. I never once got the feeling that Chris was some self-insert character or lacking in a personality of his own.

I also love his interactions with Phorni and Phorni in general. She's just so adorable, like when she tried to use a pen as large as she was to write.
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Whoops, the teacher put me with Torta, probably because I kept hanging out with her and Fal.
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I think having the teacher put you with torta might be the trigger for the no-route bad end. If you get a massive timeskip in january you're definitely not on a route
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I just got past Natale, which I learned was what Christmas is in Italian, and now it's the start of January.

It's not extremely important or anything but I'm glad French classes helped me keep the days of the week straight at least.
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